The Willow Wand for Tommy

摘要

I held him this morning like a piece of yellowed linen. But that is not right. I thought him this morning like one might think of chores or dirty laundry: the boy with no charm or woman at his sleeve who watched the sun as if it were a drowning thing in a sea of drowning things. How could he stand when at his knee there was a crook, and in the crook a history of crooks: the neighbor's child who named each fist, the girl with yellow hair, who we all loved for her yellow hair, who took him once by the hand and led him to the sea. But there were no seas in his house, only puddles that wound their ways into streams where fishermen baited their hooks and rowed from shoreline to shoreline with quiet motors. She held his hand the night he took to water and dropped the wriggling fish into his lap, and said, it is done, as if all things can be done by hook and by net, a worm into water, a fish out of sea, one death for another.