A Boy Goes Into the World
My brother rode off on his bike
into the summer afternoon, but
Mother called me back
from the end of the sandy drive:
“Its different for girls.”
He’d be gone for hours, come
back
with things: a cocoon,
gray-brown
and papery around a stick;
a puff ball, ripe, wrinkled,
and exuding spores; owl pellets-
bits of undigested bone and fur;
and pieces of moss that might
have made toupees for
preposterous
green men, but went instead
into a wide-necked jar for a
terrarium.
He mounted his plunder on poster
board, gluing and naming
each piece. He has long since
forgotten those days and things,
but I at last can claim them for my own.
Jane Kenyon
Kenyon, Jane. “A Boy Goes Out
Into the World.” Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. Saint Paul,
Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 1996. p.147.
Other books by Jane Kenyon: Room to Room, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, Constance
