The two seconds taken to assess the situation

                                                     

                                                     by Mark Doty

                                                  In Two Seconds

Tamir Rice, 2002-2014

                                   the boy's face

climbed back down the twelve-year tunnel

of its becoming, a charcoal sunflower

swallowing itself. Who has eyes to see,

or ears to hear? If you could see

what happens fastest, unmaking

the human irreplaceable, a star

falling into complete gravitational

darkness from all points of itself, all this:

the held loved body into which entered

milk and music, honeying the cells of him:

who sang to him, strokend the nap

of the scalp, kissed the flesh-knot

after the cord completed its work

of fueling into him the long history

of those those suffering

was made more bearable

by the as-yet-unknown of him,

playing alone in some unthinkable

future city, a Cleveland,

whatever that might me.

Two seconds. To elapse:

the arck of joy in the conception bed,

the labor of hands repeated until

the hands no longer required attention,

so that as the woman folded

her hopes for him sank into the fabric

of his shirts nad underpants. Down

they go, swirling down into the maw

of a greater dark. Treasure box,

comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat's collar,

why even begin to enumerate them

when behind every tributary

poured into him comes rushing backward

all he hasn't been yet. Everything

that boy could have thought or made,

sung or theorized, built on the quavering

but continuous structure

that had preceded him sank into

an absence in the shape of a boy

playing with a plastic gun in a city park

in Ohio, in the middle of the afternoon.

When I say two seconds, I don't mean the time

it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

the instant the cruiser braked to a halt

on the grass, between that moment

and the one in which the officer fired his weapon.

The two seconds taken to assess the situation.

I believe it is part of the work

of poetry to try on at least

the moment and skin of another,

for this hour I respectfully decline.

I refuse it. May that officer

be visited every night of his life

by an enormity collapsing in front of him

into an incomprehensible bloom,

and the voice that howls out of it.

If this is no poem then . . .

But that voice – erased boy,

beloved of time, who did nothing

to no one, and became

nothing because of it – I know that voice

is one of the things we call poetry.

It isn't only to his killer he's speaking.

The American Poetry Review, May/June 2015.