Decatur Island and Mount Baker and a Ferry Boat

Leaving the Island
by Sharon Olds
 

On the ferry, on the last morning of summer,
a father at the snack counter low in the boat
gets breakfast for the others. Here, let me drink some of
Mom’s coffee, so it won’t be so full
for you to carry, he says to his son,
a boy of ten or eleven. The boat
lies lower and lower in the water as the last
cars drive on, it tilts its massive
grey floor like the flat world. Then the
screaming starts, I carry four things,
and I only give you one, and you drop it,
what are you, a baby? a high, male
shrieking, and it doesn’t stop, Are you two?
Are you a baby? I give you one thing,
no one in the room seems to move for a second,
a steaming pool spreading on the floor, little
sea with its own waves, the boy
at the shore of it. Can’t you do anything
right? Are you two? Are you two?, the piercing
cry of the father. Go away,
go up to your mother, get out of here—
the purser swabbing the floor, the boy
not moving from where the first word touched him,
and I could not quite walk past him, I paused
and said I spilled my coffee on the deck, last trip,
it happens to us all. He turned to me,
his lips everted so the gums gleamed,
he hissed a guttural hiss, and in
a voice like Gollum’s or the Exorcist girl’s when she
made the stream of vomit and beamed it
eight feet straight into the minister’s mouth
he said Shut up, shut up, shut up, as if
protecting his father, peeling from himself
a thin wing of hate, and wrapping it
tightly around father and son, shielding them.