Making Nothing: So Much Depends

by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

The red wheelbarrow now rust-bitten
won’t make me reverberate

like wind peeling a silver maple
or know what my son means to say

when he play-by-plays a baseball game
or understand Joyce. It won’t stitch

a friend’s atrial hole or keep eyes
from a body carved in marble down the street.

I’ll fill it with all the evidence,
but its chain-link rattle can enter lips, pass

tongue, teeth, back, back, up and down, fall
into dark rivers and all the lit, abandoned boulevards

that lead the way to an old drive-in
closed for all seasons — sky-sized

screen stretched across lodgepole spines — and drop us
in the middle of a movie — the dialogue

low, edges blurred — filmed in a color never
seen: a fantastical, world-weary, bluer than blue.