Margaret Hasse

Our high school principal wagged his finger over two manila folders lying on his desk, labeled with our names— my boyfriend and me— called to his office for skipping school. The day before, we ditched Latin and world history to chase shadows of clouds on a motorcycle. We roared down rolling asphalt roads through the Missouri River bottoms beyond town, our heads emptied of review tests and future plans. We stopped on a dirt lane to hear a meadowlark’s liquid song, smell heart-break blossom of wild plum. Beyond leaning fence posts and barbwire, a tractor drew straight lines across the field unfurling its cape of blackbirds. Now forty years after that geography lesson in spring, I remember the principal’s words. How right he was in saying: This will be part of your permanent record.

The Roman candle of a yard light caramelizes the old snow. The glow trespasses the dark hold of December, dimming the view of the night sky with its winter triangle a boy strains to see through the haze, as he lets his jacket hang open, unzipped to the cold. He knows to return through the black cleft between buildings, below electric wires that seem to carry a little train of snow on their slim rails, where he throws the switch that shuts off the bulb on its pole, that opens the dome to a blast of stars in outer space, to the pinpoint of Jupiter, to the constellation of Orion hunting the Great Bear that the boy follows to find a smudge of gray–he can gaze through that peep hole to another galaxy also spangled with radiance from stars that traveled two and a half million light years before appearing as a signal in the rod cells of his eyes that pass impulses through neurons and nerves to his brain that creates images. He draws in a sharp breath, the high voltage power box of his chest hot and humming.

Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast. Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness. In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother, his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world. I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed. Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them. But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.

The bus steps are high, but William clambers up gamely. Doors shut. He peers out a print-marked window. From the street corner, I wave, wistful as a soldier’s bride as his bus pulls away and turns a corner. At noon the yellow bus returns him to the same place where I’m standing again. He thinks I stood there all day, waiting in his absence. When he finds out I left to play tennis, his forehead crumples like paper in a wastebasket. Now he knows I can move on my own without him. Tears drawn from the well of desertion form in his eyes. I’m his first love and his greatest disappointment.

Blue numbers on my bedside clock tell I forgot to change the hour. This sets routines on haywire. Like a domestic goat staked to its circle of earth. I don’t do well untethered. I have no hunger for early dinner, become confused by the sound of children who seem out too late for a school night. They’ve found an extra helping of daylight to romp on new grass and can’t contain themselves, strip off jackets, scatter like a rag of ponies. Whatever time says, their joy insists on springing forward.

Come home, our sons, young drivers, tell us you’re safe, not detained again by police for your dark color, sprocketed hair and a crime you didn’t commit. Maybe your car’s the wrong make or rusty in a neighborhood where cars park in garages at night. Once, when you saw a squad car you remembered Officer Smiley and his dog that did tricks in read-aloud books at J.J. Hill School. Now, as you reach for your license with shaking hands, tension raises the chance something will go wrong. This poem is for you, sons, and for everyone who is afraid— citizens of police, police of citizens. It’s for Philando Castile, a black school lunch supervisor in an inner city school who memorized children’s names and their food allergies. And it’s for the policeman who stopped a car with a damaged taillight. After he used his gun, his voice broke like a frightened child’s. Come home, sons, to mothers like me, alert at night waiting for car lights to beam in front of our house, for the car to belong to our sons, and our sons to still belong to the world.

Weeks after ice-out, last fall’s leaves make a pathway to the lake, radiant blue and still deathly cold. I press my hot forehead to the window, smudging it. Blow and the glass steams. As if looking at a photo through parchment, I’m detached, the way I saw his body in the CAT scan from a foggy distance. I’d like to open the window, release a wounded bird nursed to health. Wiping the glass with my sleeve I see white pelicans wheel and flash in the sky.