260 Childhood poems

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn't sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds— Perseverating fiddler-crabs pockworking the pluff-mud; (perforated) home-bank gurgle and seethe; breathing burrow-holes, under-warrens, (pitched) pent-forts, coverts; a rabbity heart-hammering amongst the canes; bleat of something; sleeping Mama grinding (something) with her jaw; Daddy rut-graving gravel driving off; the desolated train-trestle rust-buckling   —and falling; an echo-tolling cast-iron skillet like a gong; downrivering gone(gone)gone(gone); Sylvia supper-calling her fish-camp fish with a bell; putting her tea kettle! wren-calls on for the crying marsh-wren orphans; R.T. tale-telling down by Norton's Store "Where every Story cauls a Grief"; Daddy   —nine-eyed,knee-walking—   aisle-weeping at the Bi-Lo; Mama mash-sucking sour loquats in the shed; ire-salts quartzifying in the dark; the caustics; the fires; far Fever Creek revival-tents hymning and balming; bees thrive-gilding the glade; hand-strang bottle-oaks (and intricated yardwire-works) clocking and panging; Viaduct Forge & Foundry beating time; the bait-boys along the dock drum-dunting their buckets; vowel-howling over the water; the river; RIVER.

i The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round each arm going into the next arm, around full circle until it comes back into each of the single bodies again They are singing, but not to each other: their feet move almost in time to the singing We can see the concentration on their faces, their eyes fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them. We might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it We can see (arm in arm) as we watch them go round and round intent, almost studious (the grass underfoot ignored, the trees circling the lawn ignored, the lake ignored) that the whole point for them of going round and round is (faster slower) going round and round ii Being with you here, in this room is like groping through a mirror whose glass has melted to the consistency of gelatin You refuse to be (and I) an exact reflection, yet will not walk from the glass, be separate. Anyway, it is right that they have put so many mirrors here (chipped, hung crooked) in this room with its high transom and empty wardrobe; even the back of the door has one. There are people in the next room arguing, opening and closing drawers (the walls are thin) You look past me, listening to them, perhaps, or watching your own reflection somewhere behind my head, over my shoulder You shift, and the bed sags under us, losing its focus there is someone in the next room there is always (your face remote, listening) someone in the next room. iii However, in all their games there seems to be some reason however abstract they at first appear When we read them legends in the evening of monstrous battles, and secret betrayals in the forest and brutal deaths, they scarcely listened; one yawned and fidgeted; another chewed the wooden handle of a hammer; the youngest one examined a slight cut on his toe, and we wondered how they could remain completely without fear or even interest as the final sword slid through the dying hero. The next night walking along the beach we found the trenches they had been making: fortified with pointed sticks driven into the sides of their sand moats and a lake-enclosed island with no bridges: a last attempt (however eroded by the water in an hour) to make maybe, a refuge human and secure from the reach of whatever walks along (sword hearted) these night beaches. iv Returning to the room: I notice how all your word- plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here I watch you watching my face indifferently yet with the same taut curiosity with which you might regard a suddenly discovered part of your own body: a wart perhaps, and I remember that you said in childhood you were a tracer of maps (not making but) moving a pen or a forefinger over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) So now you trace me like a country’s boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map of this room, of your mind’s continent (here and yet not here, like the wardrobe and the mirrors the voices through the wall your body ignored on the bed), transfixed by your eyes’ cold blue thumbtacks v The children like the block of grey stone that was once a fort but now is a museum: especially they like the guns and the armour brought from other times and countries and when they go home their drawings will be full for some days, of swords archaic sunburst maces broken spears and vivid red explosions. While they explore the cannons (they aren’t our children) we walk outside along the earthworks, noting how they are crumbling under the unceasing attacks of feet and flower roots; The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending? vi And you play the safe game the orphan game the ragged winter game that says, I am alone (hungry: I know you want me to play it also) the game of the waif who stands at every picture window, shivering, pinched nose pressed against the glass, the snow collecting on his neck, watching the happy families (a game of envy) Yet he despises them: they are so Victorian Christmas-card: the cheap paper shows under the pigments of their cheerful fire- places and satin- ribboned suburban laughter and they have their own forms of parlour games: father and mother playing father and mother He’s glad to be left out by himself in the cold (hugging himself). When I tell you this, you say (with a smile fake as a tinsel icicle): You do it too. Which in some ways is a lie, but also I suppose is right, as usual: although I tend to pose in other seasons outside other windows. vii Summer again; in the mirrors of this room the children wheel, singing the same song; This casual bed scruffy as dry turf, the counterpane rumpled with small burrows, is their grassy lawn and these scuffed walls contain their circling trees, that low clogged sink their lake (a wasp comes, drawn by the piece of sandwich left on the nearby beach (how carefully you do such details); one of the children flinches but won’t let go) You make them turn and turn, according to the closed rules of your games, but there is no joy in it and as we lie arm in arm, neither joined nor separate (your observations change me to a spineless woman in a cage of bones, obsolete fort pulled inside out), our lips moving almost in time to their singing, listening to the opening and closing of the drawers in the next room (of course there is always danger but where would you locate it) (the children spin a round cage of glass from the warm air with their thread-thin insect voices) and as we lie here, caught in the monotony of wandering from room to room, shifting the place of our defences, I want to break these bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases, erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children: I want the circle broken.

I once hit clothespins for the Chicago Cubs. I'd go out after supper when the wash was in and collect clothespins from under four stories of clothesline. A swing-and-a-miss was a strike-out; the garage roof, Willie Mays, pounding his mitt under a pop fly. Bushes, a double, off the fence, triple, and over, home run. The bleachers roared. I was all they ever needed for the flag. New records every game— once, 10 homers in a row! But sometimes I'd tag them so hard they'd explode, legs flying apart in midair, pieces spinning crazily in all directions. Foul Ball! What else could I call it? The bat was real.

Beside the tree Beside the chair Beside the house Beside the pit Beside the tree stump Coco say don’t climb / so I don’t / I sit & stare — my skin coming dark and burnt They say: tire I say: brown They say: Black Black can’t take back! & I don’t I learnt to not ask where I’m from I learn to listen, then not I’m too scared they gone tell me the things about myself I done already buried in the dark Beside the tree  Beside the chair     Beside the house    Beside the pit Beside the tree stump         I sit       I sit        I sit        ’til no one even know I’m (t)here

Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.

Every few minutes, he wants to march the trail of flattened rye grass back to the house of muttering hens. He too could make a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it to his ear while the other children laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him, so little yet, too forgetful in games, ready to cry if the ball brushed him, riveted to the secret of birds caught up inside his fist, not ready to give it over to the refrigerator or the rest of the day.

In the peach orchard in an old bathtub the children are standing someone in a bath of salt water, and one gently attaches electrodes to the nipples of the one in the bath. Out of the weeds runs one with a rescued battery from the old motor home, which they had gotten to rev its engine like the sad bleating of a goat. If, later, anyone asks how they learned to do this, in a striped shirt one will say,Oh,I was looking for science experiments in those old textbooks someone got from the library book sale last year.

We’d pout. Our mother, brisking off, urged Darlings! — your vitamins & minerals dissolve inside with the milk & this-&-that into instructions rejiggering more vitamins, minerals, milk & this-&-that to fizz up & turn into actual you, or me, or anybody & etc. Experiment: — you might let drop capsules & milk into spit in one another’s cups. Watch, wait; think, add, stir. I’ll be right back. One day it quits. The whole business quits. Imagine that.

That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person Came up sucking air. Kenji was the town favorite. We wanted him to win again. He trained so hard, It was the only real talent He had Other than surfing and making Trouble. When he surfaced Second to last Gulping the night Then vomiting water, We were disappointed. He was doing so well. He had his lucky twenty-pound brick Cradled in his lap. It kept him down. But that trucker Mack was too good. He read Comic books, aloud, underwater. We watched from the bleachers His laughter bursting above him. Kenji saw this too. He never had anybody Read to him Not even his mother, And he wanted to hear What was being read What his opponent found so funny.

Grateful for their tour of the pharmacy, the first-grade class has drawn these pictures, each self-portrait taped to the window-glass, faces wide to the street, round and available, with parallel lines for hair. I like this one best: Brian, whose attenuated name fills a quarter of the frame, stretched beside impossible legs descending from the ball of his torso, two long arms springing from that same central sphere. He breathes here, on his page. It isn’t craft that makes this figure come alive; Brian draws just balls and lines, in wobbly crayon strokes. Why do some marks seem to thrill with life, possess a portion of the nervous energy in their maker’s hand? That big curve of a smile reaches nearly to the rim of his face; he holds a towering ice cream, brown spheres teetering on their cone, a soda fountain gift half the length of him —as if it were the flag of his own country held high by the unadorned black line of his arm. Such naked support for so much delight! Artless boy, he’s found a system of beauty: he shows us pleasure and what pleasure resists. The ice cream is delicious. He’s frail beside his relentless standard.