The Boy in the Box is a zombie. Dead
for sixty years and more, he has lived 
in my head that long. He starred in no horror films,
no TV series—just a flyer on a corkboard 
at the central post office. Three photos, 
one straight on, two from left and right, 
the police department wanting to identify him, 
not to haunt the dreams of, and generally 
scare the shit out of, an eight-year-old 
who saw only the crazy thatch of the botched haircut
(unexplained), the crusty splotches on the forehead
from “blunt force trauma,” the eyes blank as twin zeros.

The Box had once contained a bassinet 
that came from J. C. Penney. The mind wanders, 
to the old saw of the baby and the bathwater. 
And then the Boy: for all that he’d been starved 
and battered, his nails were freshly trimmed,
arms folded in ironic loving obsequy, 
before he was dumped in the hinterlands
of one of the city’s better neighborhoods. 
There is no Why, just as there is no Who.

He’s buried under a stone that identifies him 
only as America’s Unknown Child. 
I’m certain that he’s mine, 
my adoptive son. I’ve had no other 
in all these many years.
                        

Night travelers like us,
they’ve driven to the Circle K across the alley 
only to find it closed. I imagine the girl 
has turned to her boyfriend and said 
I got to go, no matter what! 
then in presumed modesty 
backed up to the night side of a power pole. 
The boy waits, smoking, in the car.

My wife and I watch from the parking lot 
across the way, where we’ve come to dump 
our travel trash before we part
this shut-down Florida town. And I say 
Go for it, won over by the ingenuousness
and this girlish beauty I imagine,
though her face is no more 
than a cratered life mask under the security lights. 

But I do admire the way her white 
top maps the sinuous topography upstairs.
Pitches tent between her knees.
Clothes the mystery of the shadowed 
mons below, the hinted-at thighs 
a Doric loveliness, even in this frank 
judgmental light.

                        

It is a photographic ghost.

It is the demimonde:
the shady, trick-
turning stepsister
of the day-lit hemisphere.

It is the demiurge:
the cosmic used car
salesman at the heart
of all that is quotidian.

It is the iceberg’s
sunken hull
that unrigs each day’s
most seaworthy constructs.

It is the hair shirt,
the millstone,
the one catholic 
and apostolic jail.