260 Childhood poems

I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling in mud holes underneath tree roots. You’d think it would be dangerous, but I never came up with a cooter or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips. Occasionally, though, I leapt upright, my fingers hooked through the red gills of a mudcat. And then I thrilled the thrill my father felt when he burst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled, well before dawn,“Wake up! Come here!” He tossed some fatwood on the fire and flames raged, spat, and flickered. He held a four-foot mudcat.“I caught it!” he yelled.“I caught this monster!” At first, dream-dazed, I thought it was something he’d saved us from. By firelight, the fish gleamed wickedly. But Father laughed and hugged me hard, pressing my head against his coat, which stank, and glittered where dried scales caught the light. For breakfast, he fried enormous chunks of fish, the whole house glorious for days with their rich stink. One scale stuck to my face, and as we ate he blinked, until he understood what made me glitter. He laughed, reached over, flicked the star off of my face. That’s how I felt —that wild!— when I jerked struggling fish out of the mud and held them up, long muscles shuddering on my fingers. Once, grabbling, I got lost. I traced the river to the marsh, absorbed with fishing, then absorbed with ants. With a flat piece of bark, I’d scoop red ants onto a black-ant hill and watch. Then I would shovel black ants on a red-ant hill to see what difference that would make. Not much. And I returned to grabbling, then skimming stones. Before I knew it, I’d worked my way from fresh water to salt, and I was lost. Sawgrass waved, swayed, and swung above my head. Pushed down, it sprang back. Slashed at, it slashed back. All I could see was sawgrass. Where was the sea, where land? With every step, the mud sucked at my feet with gasps and sobs that came so close to speech I sang in harmony with them. My footprints filled with brine as I walked on, still fascinated with the sweat bees, hornets, burrow bees; and, God forgive me, I was not afraid of anything. Lost in sawgrass, I knew for sure just up and down. Almost enough. Since then, they are the only things I’ve had much faith in. Night fell. The slow moon rose from sawgrass. Soon afterward I heard some cries and answered them. So I was saved from things I didn’t want to be saved from. Ma tested her green switch —zip! zip!— then laid it on my thighs, oh, maybe twice, before she fell, in tears, across my neck. She sobbed and combed my hair of cockleburs. She laughed as she dabbed alcohol into my cuts. I flinched. She chuckled. And even as a child, I heard, inside her sobs and chuckling, the lovely sucking sound of earth that followed me, gasped, called my name as I stomped through the mud, wrenched free, and heard the earth’s voice under me.

When I was a child I knew red miners dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps. I saw them come down red hills to their camps dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines. Night after night I met them on the roads, or on the streets in town I caught their glance; the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words. I also lived in low cotton country where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks, or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by; where sentiment and hatred still held sway and only bitter land was washed away.

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.

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!

In three directions are two storms. I instruct the edges of my hands to become irises, to shatter in that way, in three directions. There's nothing behind me. Viols claw beneath our fences at the elevation of sound to pure unsanctity, the moment of simultaneity: airplanes seeming to collide and not colliding, the crow alighting in the manner of a seabird, the carbomb a more than momentary poppy. The bad total of death points one direction. It moves at the edge of my hand at the memorial service, viols useless now laid across their breasts, the attitude of submission. I was eating dinner in a tall room. I was the third guest. I felt a tightening in my asshole, and the yellow wine turned to red, turned to your hand on another's woven onto tapestry. How the month of June became our sons, so many bridges for one river, was the story always delighted you. The carbomb was faster. Simultaneous with the iris the viol shatters in three directions. Everything I have taken claws helplessly at sunlight that won't defend itself. The red one is the poppy.

The children are hiding among the raspberry canes. They look big to one another, the garden small. Already in their mouths this soft fruit That lasts so briefly in the supermarket Tastes like the past. The gritty wall, Behind the veil of leaves, is hollow. There are yellow wasps inside it. The children know. They know the wall is hard, although it hums. They know a lot and will not forget it soon. When did we forget? But we were never Children, never found where they were hiding And hid with them, never followed The wasp down into its nest With a fingertip that still tingles. We lie in bed at night, thinking about The future, always the future, always forgetting That it will be the past, hard and hollow, Veiled and humming, soon enough.

Children grow in secret. They hide themselves in the depths and darker reaches of the house to become wild cats, white birches. One day when you’re only half-watching the herd as it straggles back in with the afternoon dust, one child, the prettiest of them all, comes close and rises up on tiptoe to whisper I love you,I’ll be waiting for you in the hay. Shaking some, you go to find your shotgun; you spend what’s left of the day firing at rooks and jackdaws, uncountable at this hour, and crows.