A Boy's Prayer of Stones

I try to remember the small boy I once was.
There’s evidence that he existed:
photographs, home movies, my mother’s
stories. But I can’t lay claim to even a single
authentic memory. So what does one do
at 3 a.m., full of self pity as the body
goes to shit, potbellied, root canal
toothache, sore foot, bad knee, bad back,
lonelier than hell, and worst of all,
unable to remember who I once was.
I can’t be that boy again. I imagine
he turns away from me as from a stranger,
the unknown adult as much a puzzle
to the boy as the boy is to the man,
and neither of us certain of anything.
But the boy is sunlight and water,
the darting tumble of a sparrow’s flight,
and moves through the day with a grace
courtesy of the garden though the man
has learned forbidden apples wait everywhere.
Sunlight is never more or less than sunlight,
wind never more or less than wind,
rain is rain, and the moon is always there.
Only a boy with his scraped knees
and dirty fingernails can know these things
and have a love for them as abiding
and constant as the stones he gathers
and places beneath his bed or on window sills,
small prayers he offers to the presence
that walks beside him wherever he goes
and is both the world that contains him
and he himself and all he encounters.
The years still distant when the stranger
he will become will struggle and fail
to know these things and to remember him.