The neighborhood outcasts were quiet and odd, hard to look at,
two kids teased and shunned and feared and pitied
The boy hid most days in the branches of trees
We looked up at him swaying in the nook of an oak
and wondered at his silhouette with confusion and awe
The girl, first on the block to go gazing into enlightenment
disappeared early one morning and her family said nothing
There are no reports of genius or notoriety about them later in life
They have not been chosen as persons of the year, rarely talked about
at reunions, mentioned at wakes or read about in the news
We cannot picture them grown or hear their questions to our answers
They lurk in our twilight years between fantasy and definition
Each of us has but a single memory of a moment alone with them
Mine was a birthday when he took me to a movie and slipped me
a small knife that I opened in the dark and brushed by impulse
across my fingertips as if to test its reality, hiding the pain and blood
without a flinch under the left leg of my jeans
She passed me on the street, wordless, unsmiling, handed me
a rare stick of cinnamon gum, her eyes stuck skyward, kept walking
I stood watching the aura of her tall slender figure in the sunshine
until she met the shade and became one of its shadows
If they are dead or alive, where they have gone, what they do now,
remains as mysterious to me as the origins of the universe
If not deceased, they must still be out there beyond the range
of science and society if only because I want them to be,
that is, given what I know and do not know, and still cheer
for them to arrive at whatever destination they hope
awaits them outside the far edges of standard deviations