260 Childhood poems

Where did you get such a dirty face, My darling dirty-faced child? I got it from crawling along in the dirt And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt. I got it from chewing the roots of a rose And digging for clams in the yard with my nose. I got it from peeking into a dark cave And painting myself like a Navajo brave. I got it from playing with coal in the bin And signing my name in cement with my chin. I got it from rolling around on the rug And giving the horrible dog a big hug. I got it from finding a lost silver mine And eating sweet blackberries right off the vine. I got it from ice cream and wrestling and tears And from having more fun than you’ve had in years.

Quilt voice into flat prairie land. Swell stature into argument. Carve wrongdoing into wood chips, easily digestible. Engage in preemptive fork removal. Do not be implicit. Silence, a coiled threat. What’s in your holster? Separate the child from the chaff. I mean, spoon the cream off the top. What do you mean you don’t have a holster? Keep the curds. Discard the whey.

Our mascot was the bulldog. Bulldogs chased me across playgrounds until I dreamed them. In class, I finished mazes with a green crayon. Hedges grew skyward from pages, and I ran. My dad once called this kind of thing my day-head. When my day-head happened, they called him at his office. I learned the name Daedalus from an article I read for science class. It meant a plane with leg-powered wings — carbon tubing, plastic skin. A man with a long name flew a longer way across the sea from Crete. At recess, I reread the same book of illustrated myths and cryptids. I dreamed of bulldogs with bulls’ heads. My day-head was a zoo where gods slept.Daedalus sounded like dad, so I loved him. Class was an enclosure made of cinder block and twelve weeks without winter. Behind the glass, my day-head paced. Daedalus was a zookeeper. I dreamed of a god with a bull’s body and a hood sewn from my face. The article said I weighed the same as the Daedalus. I traced flight plans and crash sites on my desk. My teacher asked us to draw self-portraits. The trees were hydras. On the paper, I drew an outline of my face. I cut my eyes out with scissors. They called me to the office, and Daedalus was waiting. I found a bulldog in a magazine and drew a maze inside each iris. We played tug-of-war in gym. My day-head was a knotted rope dangling from steel rafters. I pushed my thumb into the sun. I fell once. I cut the bulldog from the page, then ripped his head in two. I glued one half over the left side of my face. I left the right side blank. The article said the Daedalus crashed twenty-one feet from the black sand of a beach on Santorini. My day-head was a Kevlar fuselage belly-down in the sea. They called home. I ran home. On the right side of my face, I drew a sunny day. I signed my name.

Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich, on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground— wherever the children slept, dolls have been found in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again by the Finders After Everything. Down lay the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug, sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog, and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.

The girls turning double-dutch bob & weave like boxers pulling punches, shadowing each other, sparring across the slack cord casting parabolas in the air. They whip quick as an infant’s pulse and the jumper, before she enters the winking, nods in time as if she has a notion to share, waiting her chance to speak. But she’s anticipating the upbeat like a bandleader counting off the tune they are about to swing into. The jumper stair-steps into mid-air as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity, training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment long enough to fit a second thought in, she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish as she flutter-floats into motion like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos thumbed alive. Once inside, the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch acquired Manhattan. How she dances patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing its travels in scale before the hive. How the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope slaps and scoops like a paddle boat. Her misted skin arranges the light with each adjustment and flex. Now heather- hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle, surfaces fracturing and reforming like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water. She makes jewelry of herself and garlands the ground with shadows.

He could not die when trees were green, For he loved the time too well. His little hands, when flowers were seen, Were held for the bluebell, As he was carried o'er the green. His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee; He knew those children of the spring: When he was well and on the lea He held one in his hands to sing, Which filled his heart with glee. Infants, the children of the spring! How can an infant die When butterflies are on the wing, Green grass, and such a sky? How can they die at spring? He held his hands for daisies white, And then for violets blue, And took them all to bed at night That in the green fields grew, As childhood's sweet delight. And then he shut his little eyes, And flowers would notice not; Birds' nests and eggs caused no surprise, He now no blossoms got; They met with plaintive sighs. When winter came and blasts did sigh, And bare were plain and tree, As he for ease in bed did lie His soul seemed with the free, He died so quietly.

According to Mister Hedges, the custodian who called upon their parents after young Otwiner and young Julia were spotted at the matinee of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik at the segregated Knickerbocker Theater in the uncommon Washington December of 1922, “Your young ladies were misrepresenting themselves today,” meaning, of course, that they were passing. After coffee and no cake were finished and Mister Hedges had buttoned his coat against the strange evening chill, choice words were had with Otwiner and Julia, shame upon the family, shame upon the race. How they’d longed to see Rudolph Valentino, who was swarthy like a Negro, like the finest Negro man. In The Sheik, they’d heard, he was turbaned, whisked damsels away in a desert cloud. They’d heard this from Lucille and Ella who’d put on their fine frocks and French, claiming to be “of foreign extraction” to sneak into the Knickerbocker Theater past the usher who knew their parents but did not know them. They’d heard this from Mignon and Doris who’d painted carmine bindis on their foreheads braided their black hair tight down the back, and huffed, “We’ll have to take this up with the Embassy” to the squinting ticket taker. Otwiner and Julia were tired of Oscar Michaux, tired of church, tired of responsibility, rectitude, posture, grooming, modulation, tired of homilies each way they turned, tired of colored right and wrong. They wanted to be whisked away. The morning after Mister Hedges’ visit the paperboy cried “Extra!” and Papas shrugged camel’s hair topcoats over pressed pajamas, and Mamas read aloud at the breakfast table, “No Colored Killed When Roof Caves In” at the Knickerbocker Theater at the evening show from a surfeit of snow on the roof. One hundred others dead. It appeared that God had spoken. There was no school that day, no movies for months after.

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat of his father’s Ford and the mysterium of time, holds time in memory with words, night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make the child think of time in its passing, of death. Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe up the gullied, mud-hollowed road.Road, this road

1 Child waking up in a dark room screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back in a language nobody understands in the least — There is no duck. But the dog, all upholstered in white plush — the dog is right there in the crib next to him. Years and years — that’s how much time passes. All in a dream. But the duck — no one knows what happened to that. 2 They’ve  just met, now they’re sleeping near an open window. Partly to wake them, to assure them that what they remember of  the night is correct, now light needs to enter the room, also to show them the context in which this occurred: socks half  hidden under a dirty mat, quilt decorated with green leaves — the sunlight specifying these but not other objects, setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary, then lingering, describing each thing in detail, fastidious, like a composition in English, even a little blood on the sheets — 3 Afterward, they separate for the day. Even later, at a desk, in the market, the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given, the berries moldy under the topmost layer — so that one withdraws from the world even as one continues to take action in it — You get home, that’s when you notice the mold. Too late, in other words. As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house.   At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again.   What was her fierce commitment?   I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.