“Worms”

by John Repp

What will my son hate at twelve?
A rhetorical question worth

thinking about, and though I think
hard, nothing comes to mind.

Long before that, he’ll first
hate me, his mother, each molecule

and moment of the life we’ve made.
He’ll lounge in the lucid heat

of rage, think himself
utterly alien, plan the first

of a thousand escapes.
I know all this

and believe none of it.
He’s fifteen months old, free

of hatred. Imagine that.
__________

I hated the night crawlers my father
hauled home from Philadelphia,

two or three waxed-cardboard,
5000-count boxes per trip. I need you

to count worms he’d say at breakfast.
Slouching to the tackle shop’s back room,

My brother and I would sit
on overturned galvanized buckets

until we’d built a fortress
of two-dozen-count containers.

I hate this we said. Sometimes, jaws clenched
so tight our teeth squeaked, we said I hate him.

Rookie adolescents, we each played cast, crew
and audience in a limbic theater, soliloquies eloquent

as Peter Pan, Smoky Robinson and Diana Rigg
put together. As for the quotidian moment,

we hunched pockmarked and oily near the lathe.
I said I hate Simon & Garfunkel

meaning The only thing saving Sounds of Silence
from the trash fire is The Belt. My brother said I hate

the fucking Beatles and I imagined Help! melting.
It was ridiculous. It went on and on.

We didn’t know asses from grins,
knew it so well we wanted gone

from our home, from all homes.
Thus the “Million Worms” canto

of the family epic. At each stanza’s end,
we’d load the Frigidaire rumbling by the minnow tank,

rinse our hands in the brackish water,
skim dead bullheads while we were at it.
__________

I would forsake everything
but my wife and son to breathe

for one minute the aroma
of humus, boy-sweat, worm-slime.
__________

I would forsake everything
to relive the moment I whispered

in my boy’s three-day-old ear
as he screeched and thrashed at three a.m.

I hate you. I hate you forever.