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I lay my head sideways on the desk, My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones, My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse, White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree. From where I sat, on still days, I’d watch The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read The desk carved with adults’ names: Marietta Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm; The wood hacked or lovingly hollowed, the flies Settling on the obsolete & built-in inkwells. I remember, tonight, only details, how Mrs. Avery, now gone, was standing then In her beige dress, its quiet, gazelle print Still dark with lines of perspiration from The day before; how Gracie Chin had just Shown me how to draw, with chalk, a Chinese Ideogram. Where did she go, white thigh With one still freckle, lost in silk? No one would say for sure, so that I’d know, So that all shapes, for days after, seemed Brushstrokes in Chinese: countries on maps That shifted, changed colors, or disappeared: Lithuania, Prussia, Bessarabia; The numbers four & seven; the question mark. That year, I ate almost nothing. I thought my parents weren’t my real parents, I thought there’d been some terrible mistake. At recess I would sit alone, seeing In the print of each leaf shadow, an ideogram— Still, indecipherable, beneath the green sound The bell still made, even after it had faded, When the dust-covered leaves of the oak tree Quivered, slightly, if I looked up in time. And my father, so distant in those days, Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle By a plum tree, the sun rising over The Sierras? It is not Chinese, but English— When the past tense, when you first learn to use it As a child, throws all the verbs in the language Into the long, flat shade of houses you Ride past, & into town. Your father’s driving. On winter evenings, the lights would come on earlier. People would be shopping for Christmas. Each hand, With the one whorl of its fingerprints, with twenty Delicate bones inside it, reaching up To touch some bolt of cloth, or choose a gift, A little different from any other hand. You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark, But leaves names, lovers, places showing through: Gracie Chin, my father, Lithuania; A beige dress where dark gazelles hold still? Outside, it’s snowing, cold, & a New Year. The trees & streets are turning white. I always thought he would come back like this. I always thought he wouldn’t dare be seen.

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree out of blue sky    the wind sings loudest surrounding me. And solitude,   a wild solitude ’s reveald,   fearfully,   high     I’d climb into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing,   part     daring my self, part to see that widening of the world,   part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings, far calls,   close calls—   the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am   “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.”

They learned to turn off the gravity in an auditorium and we all rose into the air, the same room where they demonstrated pow-wows and prestidigitation. But not everyone believed it. That was the most important lesson I learned—that a truck driven by a dog could roll down a hill at dusk and roll right off a dock into a lake and sink, and if no one believes you then what is the point of telling them wonderful things? I walked home from the pow-wow on an early winter night in amazement: they let me buy the toy tomahawk! As soon as I got home I was going to hit my sister with it, but I didn’t know this.

They don’t wade in so much as they are taken. Deep in the day, in the deep of the field, every current in the grasses whispers hurry hurry , every yellow spreads its perfume like a rumor, impelling them further on. It is the way of girls. It is the sway of their dresses in the summer trance- light, their bare calves already far-gone in green. What songs will they follow? Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm or harm the border promises, whatever calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless through the high grass and into the willow- blur, traceless across the lean blue glint of the river, to the long dark bodies of the conifers, and over the welcoming threshold of nightfall.

When children play the livelong day, Like birds and butterflies; As free and gay, sport life away, And know not care nor sighs: Then earth and air seem fresh and fair, All peace below, above: Life’s flowers are there, and everywhere Is innocence and love. When children pray with fear all day, A blight must be at hand: Then joys decay, and birds of prey Are hovering o’er the land: When young hearts weep as they go to sleep, Then all the world seems sad: The flesh must creep, and woes are deep When children are not glad.

When I am a toddler, a child, a tween, a teen, and a young adult, I am called an ancestral soul, a ti gran moun, a little old person. Adults study me and decide that I am wise beyond my years, mature for my age, emotionally ripe. I am told it is unusual to meet a five-ten-fifteen-year-old girl who does not slouch or mumble or speak in monosyllables. When I do the things that come naturally to me—when I hold my spine up erect, when I wait my turn to speak, when I speak having listened, carefully, when I enunciate, when I look grown-ups in the eye—I am told I must have “been here before.” "How do you know?" one college professor asks me after she has seen a psychologically violent play I have written at age nineteen. "How do you already know?” In high school, I charm my teachers. They encourage me to write speeches about feminism that I recite for International Women's Day at City Hall or deliver as part of conference panels at local universities. “If you were older," they tell me, "we would probably be friends.” One of them even flirts with me. Among my peers I exist somewhere between amicably mysterious and irrevocably dorky. The popular kids greet me in the hallways, but they never invite me to their beer-drenched parties. I will never play Spin the Bottle. I will never play Seven Minutes in Heaven. My mother tells me she is protecting me from boys, but the truth is, after I do my homework, she wants me to type up another family friend’s résumé or resignation letter. At home, I am a bridge, a cultural interpreter, a spokesperson, a trusted ally, an American who is Haitian too, but also definitely American. The children of immigrants don't get to be children. We lose our innocence watching our parents' backs bend, break. I am an old soul because when I am young, I watch my parents' spirits get slaughtered. In Haiti, they were middle class. Hopeful teachers. Home owners. They were black like their live-in servants. They donated clothes to the poor. They gave up everything they knew to inherit American dreams. And here, they join factory lines, wipe shit from mean old white men's behinds, scrub five-star hotel toilets for dimes above minimum wage. Here, they shuck and jive and step and fetch and play chauffeur to people who aren't as smart as they are, people who do not speak as many languages as they do. In the 1980s, they are barred from giving blood because newscasters and politicians say that AIDS comes from where they come from: Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a black magic island that spawns boat people and chaos, a place of illiterate zombies, orphan beggars and brazen political corruption. When I am a child, my childhood is a luxury my family cannot afford. Their dignity is not spared, so my innocence is not spared. They are humiliated and traumatized daily, so I become a nurse to their trauma. I am told too much, so I know too much, so I am wise beyond my years. When I am six, my mother tells me that when she found out she was pregnant with me at age nineteen, she “tried to kill the baby." She says "the baby," as if it isn’t me she’s talking about; as if I am not the expensive, scandalous daughter who forced my way into her world despite the abortion-inducing herbal teas she drank and her frantic leaps off of small buildings. When I am sixteen, my father calls me on the phone to, inevitably, weep. He says, "Living in this country, I have learned not to hope for things. Only you are my hope. Only you." So—yes, I grow up fast.

Winter is fallen early On the house of Stare; Birds in reverberating flocks Haunt its ancestral box; Bright are the plenteous berries In clusters in the air. Still is the fountain’s music, The dark pool icy still, Whereupon a small and sanguine sun Floats in a mirror on, Into a West of crimson, From a South of daffodil. ’Tis strange to see young children In such a wintry house; Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow Their tell-tale footprints go; Their laughter rings like timbrels ’Neath evening ominous: Their small and heightened faces Like wine-red winter buds; Their frolic bodies gentle as Flakes in the air that pass, Frail as the twirling petal From the briar of the woods. Above them silence lours, Still as an arctic sea; Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon Glitters; the crocus soon Will open grey and distracted On earth’s austerity: Thick mystery, wild peril, Law like an iron rod:— Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire, Each with his tiny fire Blown to a core of ardour By the awful breath of God.

1 People who have no children can be hard: Attain a mail of ice and insolence: Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense Hesitate in the hurricane to guard. And when wide world is bitten and bewarred They perish purely, waving their spirits hence Without a trace of grace or of offense To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred. While through a throttling dark we others hear The little lifting helplessness, the queer Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous Lost softness softly makes a trap for us. And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of The malocclusions, the inconditions of love. 2 What shall I give my children? who are poor, Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land, Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand No velvet and no velvety velour; But who have begged me for a brisk contour, Crying that they are quasi, contraband Because unfinished, graven by a hand Less than angelic, admirable or sure. My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device. But I lack access to my proper stone. And plenitude of plan shall not suffice Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone To ratify my little halves who bear Across an autumn freezing everywhere. 3 And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray? Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules Spectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals And all hysterics arrogant for a day. Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay. Children, confine your lights in jellied rules; Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules. Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray. Behind the scurryings of your neat motif I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm If that should frighten you: sew up belief If that should tear: turn, singularly calm At forehead and at fingers rather wise, Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.

to Somes from incarceration, Taunton State Hospital, 1972 gaunt, ugly deformed broken from the womb, and horribly shriven at the labor of their forefathers, if you check back scout around grey before actual time their sordid brains don’t work right, pinched men emaciated, piling up railroad ties and highway ditches blanched women, swollen and crudely numb ered before the dark of dawn scuttling by candlelight, one not to touch, that is, a signal panic thick peasants after the attitude at that time of their century, bleak and centrifugal they carry about them, tough disciplines of copper Indianheads. there are worse, whom you may never see, non-crucial around the spoke, these you do, seldom locked in Taunton State Hospital and other peon work farms drudge from morning until night, abandoned within destitute crevices odd clothes intent on performing some particular task long has been far removed there is no hope, they locked-in key’s; housed of course and there fed, poorly off sooted, plastic dishes, soiled grimy silver knives and forks, stamped Department of Mental Health spoons but the unshrinkable duties of any society produces its ill-kempt, ignorant and sore idiosyncrasies. There has never been a man yet, whom no matter how wise can explain how a god, so beautiful he can create the graces of formal gardens, the exquisite twilight sunsets in splendor of elegant toolsmiths, still can yield the horror of dwarfs, who cannot stand up straight with crushed skulls, diseases on their legs and feet unshaven faces of men and women, worn humped backs, deformed necks, hare lips, obese arms distended rumps, there is not a flame shoots out could ex- tinguish the torch of any liberty’s state infection. 1907, My Mother was born, I am witness t- o the exasperation of gallant human beings at g- od, priestly fathers and Her Highness, Holy Mother the Church persons who felt they were never given a chance, had n- o luck and were flayed at suffering. They produced children with phobias, manias and depression, they cared little for their own metier, and kept watch upon others, some chance to get ahead Yes life was hard for them, much more hard than for any blo ated millionaire, who still lives on their hard-earned monies. I feel I shall have to be punished for writing this, that the omniscient god is the rich one, cared little for looks, less for Art, still kept weekly films close for the free dishes and scandal hot. Some how though got cheated in health and upon hearth. I am one of them. I am witness not to Whitman’s vision, but instead the poorhouses, the mad city asylums and re- life worklines. Yes, I am witness not to God’s goodness, but his better or less scorn. The First of May, The Commonwealth of State of Massachusetts, 1972

Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour. I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet. From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. A whisper, and then a silence: Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise. A sudden rush from the stairway, A sudden raid from the hall! By three doors left unguarded They enter my castle wall! They climb up into my turret O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me; They seem to be everywhere. They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine! Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old mustache as I am Is not a match for you all! I have you fast in my fortress, And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeon In the round-tower of my heart. And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!