Lesley, son of May

He is two months old,
the soft side of death
from his echoing eyes
two shy ice-cream scoops,
caves in which his thumbs sleep
forming the cross-bar of an almost-cross,
he knew he saw
his mother
sucking his numb cheeks
teaching him to swallow
with little-bird sounds

Twenty years for him to:
eat
walk
sleep
(inconclusively)
no purrs, croaks, squaks, words or shrieks
floated through his tactile lips,
her faith a stupid cross,
a frightening lizard she carried
in her mouth,
slipping away at night
it’s tail a forked tongue

Until,
in the light of that night
when he was almost upright,
factory-reject gone platinum
that idiot savant, the Unnamed,
sanctified her
and, care of N.B.C., me,
with two grotesque gifts:
he cried once
fleshy, fatty tears blurping
down in xeroxed precision,
black-red ones
until the pool shimmering
under his piano seemed to run backwards,
into his sockets
two vermillion snakes slithering
over his pyjamas and chins
and then, on some insula of his tangled mind
he met Saint-Saëns and
stroked and ululated
the gnarled Würlitzer into sonnets
of cadenzas and fugues and,
and whilst crying , he sang,
and redeemed me.

1986(?)

(One of the most famous of all ABC Afterschool Specials, ‘The Woman Who Willed a Miracle’ is the true story of two remarkable people: a middle-aged Wisconsin nurse May Lemke, who adopts a six-month-old boy named Leslie and brings him into her family. Abandoned as an infant, Leslie is blind, severely retarded, and suffers from cerebral palsy. Against all odds, May raises Leslie in as "normal" a manner as possible, teaching him to dress and feed himself. Unfortunately, she is unable to get him to speak or respond to intellectual stimuli -- until, at age 16, Leslie listens to a televised classical-music concert, sits down at the family piano, and replays the entire concert from memory, every note to perfection! Remaining sightless, mentally challenged, and essentially nonverbal, Leslie gains worldwide fame as the quintessential "savant," flawlessly playing complicated piano compositions and singing along as he goes...with the recorded works of his musical idol Liberace as his primary inspiration.)