It scratches against the itch and burn of the heat,
belt against blade, scratching one against the other,
against the sound of sleep, against the call of summer,
scratching against a small boy’s mind
in the call and wane of what he’s never understood,
of murderous mosquitoes, the sting of wetted baking soda
on what he’s scratched bloody,
of the questions, of the fears, of the hurts of the night,
of the pulse of tree frogs, of the bark of angry voices now silent,
of tree branches scratching dusty black screens,
filtering slight breezes, the scent of running rain,
the intermittent odor of dead rat in dried spirea,
of a garbage can full of chewed cobs and naked chicken bones,
of newly cut grass, of trees, of sewers, of the neighborhood,
of the exhaust of cars, his own sweat, his own fierceness,
of the sound of the fan going round and round
missing in regular irregularity, its chink-chink-chink
chopping at the humidity, stirring the fever of the night
in all that was human in him,
of the few sacred hours of humdrum space to the rote
of the old fan’s constant scratching and drumming,
circling again and again through night and just before morning,
when he could drift into dreams to the whir its wide slow blades,
of the worn belt of the fan’s motor of worn ball bearings,
the sounds of painful words already spoken, throat sounds,
gut sounds, sounds of mourned loss, of the heart’s drum,
of the struggle of a fan handmade with leftover parts,
its rotations vibrating between his ears, vibrating
within the wide skull of the world