260 Childhood poems

A BB gun. A model plane. A basketball. A ’lectric train. A bicycle. A cowboy hat. A comic book. A baseball bat. A deck of cards. A science kit. A racing car. A catcher’s mitt. So that’s my list of everything that Santa Claus forgot to bring.

it started with the first time i opened the closet in my new bedroom. paper flecks bursting from behind the door. they had been waiting all millennia. you helped me pick them from my hair but even weeks later we’d still find pieces in between teeth — under tongues — on shoulders & lodged beneath fingernails. you were always so gentle as you’d release them out the window — same as you’d do for a spider. when finished with a rainbow it is the task of the youngest angel to put it through the paper shredder. he crouches in the cloud mist — taking handfuls of the body’s remnants. he learns not to weep after years of practice. the first rainbow he shredded was that one that we tried to follow in your car — driving around wet fallen trees — mist rising from the asphalt. we never did get there but we did stop for ice cream. you bit the bottom off the cone. the sound of the rainbow’s destruction was only a dull static noise to us down here. i noticed it but didn’t want to tell you. the next time i was tearing open what looked like a credit card offer in the mail & out came the confetti. we had just stopped finding it on everything — gushing like an artery i covered my face until it was through. mounds upon mounds of color. stole the rake from my aunt’s shed we had used to rake leaves in early october before the weather gave herself over to frost. i resisted the impulse to make the confetti into piles to leap into. you were coming over & i wanted to be clean. the next time we slept together i transported myself somewhere else as you kissed me. sat on the collarbone of the rainbow as it was shred along with my hair. me, with the thousand-piece body. me, getting blown away by the first breeze. me, inhaling the tears of the kneeling angel. i came back to the room when you knelt, spitting paper out of your mouth. confetti began to pour out from behind my lips, miraculously dry. each time i tried to apologize more came out; you, naked on the bedroom floor trying to dispose of the colors as they came. flow mountain spring. flow slit neck of a pig. flash flood & flow melted ice cream down to our elbows. by the time it stopped your fear turned to anger. slammed the door as you left & there i was with all this color. i put some in my mouth but it was too bitter too swallow. if i don’t kiss anyone this won’t happen again — i can keep it a beautiful secret. routine: each morning removing the piles of cut paper. when you come over i sometimes find them on your skin. you don’t notice so i kiss them off your neck. i’m trying i’m trying. i peel the rainbows free & roll them up like yoga mats in the closet. the shredding has gotten so loud — i ask you if you hear it & you shake your head, unknowingly. i can’t stand it — i can’t stand it. caress this color out of me.

On the mudroad of plodding American bodies, my son wove like an antelope from stall to stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-up killer robot and winged alien; knives hierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolf bobbing from a pilgrim’s staff. Lured as I was by the bar-b-que’s black smoke, I got in line. A hog carcass, blistered pink on a spit, made its agonized slow roll, a metaphor, I thought, for anyone ahead of me—the pasty-faced and broad. I half-longed for the titanium blade I’d just seen curved like a falcon’s claw. Some truth wanted cutting in my neighbors’ impermanent flesh. Or so my poisoned soul announced, as if scorn for the body politic weren’t some outward form of inner scorn, as if I were fit judge. Lucky my son found the bumper cars. Once I’d hoped only to stand tall enough to drive my own. Now when the master switch got thrown and sparks skittered overhead in a lightning web, I felt like Frankenstein or some newly powered monster. Plus the floor was glossy as ice. Even rammed head-on, the rubber bumper bounced you off unhurt and into other folks who didn’t mind the jolt, whose faces all broke smiles, in fact, till the perfect figure-eight I’d started out to execute became itself an interruption. One face after another wheeled shining at me from the dark, each bearing the weight of a whole self. What pure vessels we are, I thought, once our skulls shut up their nasty talk. We drove home past corn at full tassel, colossal silos, a windmill sentinel. Summer was starting. My son’s body slumped like a grain sack against mine. My chest was all thunder. On the purple sky in rear view, fireworks unpacked—silver chrysanthemum, another in fuchsia, then plum. Each staccato boom shook the night. My son jerked in his sleep. I prayed hard to keep the frail peace we hurtled through, to want no more than what we had. The road rushed under us. Our lush planet heaved toward day. Inside my hand’s flesh, anybody’s skeleton gripped the wheel.

I was born drunk & paisley, vestige from the womb. My face laughed into itself— eyes sank into earlobe & nostrils warped into seahorse. I was vanilla bean & Mexican vanilla & amniotic dessert, & my mother did everything she could not to devour me. I became comino & ajo & hibiscus— all good for grinding. Mocajete, fist, & knuckle decomposing mass & matter, baby & mother. When she tried to stillbear me it hurt until she cried diamonds while my father was swapping spit with the agave.

My son's been learning time: big hand and little, powers of sixty and of twenty-four, the slow semaphore of days. He's brought home paper plates from kindergarten, arrows pointing at his favorite hours. So far the face of every clock has smiled. And before we read to sleep each night he crosses off another square on the calendar above his bed, counting down to Christmas or to nothing in particular, sometimes just a line he draws uphill or down, check marks like the ones his teacher leaves on sheets he's filled with capitals and lower cases, other times a pair of thick lines like the crossed bones on a pirate's flag, an X as if to mark the treasure buried in some ordinary week, no day yet a cross to bear.

Even the wind wants to become a cart pulled by butterflies. I remember madness leaning for the first time on the mind’s pillow. I was talking to my body then and my body was an idea I wrote in red. Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne and all the other colors worship on red rugs. Night is another candle. In every branch, an arm, a message carried in space echoed by the body of the wind. The sun insists on dressing itself in fog when it meets me: Am I being scolded by the light? Oh, my past days— they used to walk in their sleep and I used to lean on them. Love and dreams are two parentheses. Between them I place my body and discover the world. Many times I saw the air fly with two grass feet and the road dance with feet made of air. My wishes are flowers staining my days. I was wounded early, and early I learned that wounds made me. I still follow the child who still walks inside me. Now he stands at a staircase made of light searching for a corner to rest in and to read the face of night again. If the moon were a house, my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep. They are taken by dust carrying me to the air of seasons. I walk, one hand in the air, the other caressing tresses that I imagine. A star is also a pebble in the field of space. He alone who is joined to the horizon can build new roads. A moon, an old man, his seat is night and light is his walking stick. What shall I say to the body I abandoned in the rubble of the house in which I was born? No one can narrate my childhood except those stars that flicker above it and that leave footprints on the evening’s path. My childhood is still being born in the palms of a light whose name I do not know and who names me. Out of that river he made a mirror and asked it about his sorrow. He made rain out of his grief and imitated the clouds. Your childhood is a village. You will never cross its boundaries no matter how far you go. His days are lakes, his memories floating bodies. You who are descending from the mountains of the past, how can you climb them again, and why? Time is a door I cannot open. My magic is worn, my chants asleep. I was born in a village, small and secretive like a womb. I never left it. I love the ocean not the shores.

When you grow up, what will you do? Please come to my tea party. I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you? Let’s take a trip to the zoo. Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee. You’re silly! When you grow up, what will you do? One plus one equals two. It’s fun to learn your ABC’s. I’m Chatty Cathy, who are you? Please come help me tie my shoe. Can you come out and play with me? When you grow up, what will you do? The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. Please read me a bedtime story. I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you? Our flag is red, white and blue. Let’s makebelieve you’re Mommy. When you grow up, what will you do? I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you?

I was waiting to try out one of my inventions from the flattop garage roof — parachutes this time — when I tasted a black cherry from the next yard, wondering even at that age who had prior rights and what was constitutional so instead of  jumping I wrote a brief brief called Yaakov vs. the Tree Trunk where everyone laughed herself crazy at Marlboro vs. Madison or Red Stain vs. the State of New Jersey so bless me you fools for aren’t you mortals? And don’t you bend your body down over the water to taste the ice? And who, in your family, even ever just thought of swallowing a goldfish from the bowl, say, picking up its slippery body, bending your neck back and gulping it down even before they entered law school?

A child is something else again. Wakes up in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words, in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm, instant light, instant darkness. A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet. They're training him to be a polite Job, to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given, to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away. A child is vengeance. A child is a missile into the coming generations. I launched him: I'm still trembling. A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence, kissing him in his sleep, hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles. A child delivers you from death. Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Mother, the root of this little yellow flower Among the stones has the taste of quinine. Things are strange to-day on the cliff. The sun shines so bright, And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look; I lie so still. There’s one on your book. But I have something to tell more strange. So leave Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear,— Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place,— And listen now. Can you hear what I hear Far out? Now and then the foam there curls And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s. Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be A chapel or church between here and Devon, With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!— Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven. “It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay On the buoy. It does sound sweet to-day.” Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales. I should like to be lying under that foam, Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell, And certain that you would often come And rest, listening happily. I should be happy if that could be.