260 Childhood poems

2810 El Paso Street, 1974 Solitary as a mast on a mountaintop, an ocean of knowing long withdrawn, she dittied the days, grew fluent in cat, felt, she said, each seed surreptitiously split the adamantine dark, believing green. It was the town's torpor washed me to her door, it was the itch existence stranded me on that shore of big-lipped shells pinked with altogether other suns, random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls sometimes a citizen seemed to peek through, inward and inward all the space and spice of her edible heavens. O to feel again within the molded dough wet pottery, buttery cosmos, brain that has not cooled; to bring to being an instant sculpture garden: five flashlit jackrabbits locked in black. From her I learned the earthworm's exemplary open-mindedness, its engine of discriminate shit. From her I learned all the nuances of neverness that link the gladiola to God. How gone she must be, graveless maybe, who felt the best death would be for friends to eat you, whose last name I never even knew: dirt-rich mouse-proud lady who Rubied me into a life so starred and laughtered there was no need for after.

We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.

The best game the fairies play, The best game of all, Is sliding down steeples— (You know they’re very tall). You fly to the weathercock, And when you hear it crow, You fold your wings and clutch your things And then let go! They have a million other games— Cloud-catching’s one, And mud-mixing after rain Is heaps and heaps of fun; But when you go and stay with them Never mind the rest, Take my advice—they’re very nice, But steeple-sliding’s best!

I. Daily, the kindergarteners passed my porch. I loved their likeness and variety, their selves in line like little monosyllables, but huggable— I wasn't meant to grab them, ever, up into actual besmooches or down into grubbiest tumbles, my lot was not to have them, in the flesh. Was it better or worse to let their lovability go by untouched, and just watch over their river of ever- inbraiding relations? I wouldn't mother them or teach. We couldn't be each other's others; maybe, at removes, each other's each. II. Each toddler had a hand-hold on a loop of rope, designed to haul the whole school onward in the sidewalk stream— like pickerel through freshets, at the pull of something else's will, the children spun and bobbled, three years old and four (or were they little drunken Buddhas, buoyant, plump?). They looked now to the right, now to the sky, and now toward nothing (nothing was too small)— they followed a thread of destination, chain of command, order of actual rope that led to what? Who knew? For here and now in one child's eye there was a yellow truck, and in another's was a burning star; but from my own perspective, overhead, adult, where trucks and suns had lost their luster, they were one whole baby-rush toward a target, toward the law of targets, fledge in the wake of an arrowhead; a bull's-eye bloomed, a red eight-sided sign. What did I wish them? Nothing I foresaw.

This boy lying face down in my sleep pushes around jars of jelly, waking me the night he is found so I can drag him from the wet ground and clean his blackened belly, this boy lying face down who is somehow bound to me, this hunted herdsman, refugee waking me the night he is found. Am I to dress him in an open gown, bless the holes in his chest with tea leaves? This boy lying face down, permeating even the simplest sound, with the crack in the door he slowly cries, waking me the night he is found, lips parted to my blue-black ground, whispering red vetch inside me, this slender boy lying down, waking me the night he is found.

Each could picture probably with great care his brother drawing the corded string of a watered silk bag and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake pay your respects to mother's white hair now your eyebrows look a little white too

1 One royal afternoon When I was young and easily surprised By uncles coming from the park At the command of nurses and of guards, I wondered, over trees and ponds, At the sorry, rude walls And the white windows of the apartments. “These,” said my uncle, “are the tallest houses.” 2 Yes, in the spring of my joy When I was visibly affected by a gaitered bishop, Large and unsteady in the flagged yard, Guards, dogs and blackbirds fled on every hand. “He is an old one,” said uncle, “The gaiters are real.” 3 Rippled, fistfed windows of your Dun high houses! Then Come cages made of pretty willows Where they put the palace girls! Green ducks wade slowly from the marble water. One swan reproves a saucy daughter. I consider my own true pond, Look for the beginning and the end. I lead the bishop down lanes and islands. 4 Yes, in the windows of my first existence Before my yawns became seasons, When nurses and uncles were sure, Chinese fowl fought the frosty water Startled by this old pontifex. “No bridge” (He smiled Between the budding branches), “No crossing to the cage Of the paradise bird!” Astounded by the sermons in the leaves I cried, “No! No! The stars have higher houses!” Kicking the robins and ganders From the floor of his insular world The magic bishop leaned his blessing on the children. 5 That was the bold day when Moved by the unexpected summons I opened all the palace aviaries As by a king’s representative I was appointed fowler.

Foreseeing typographical errors on their gravestones, the children from infancy—are bitter. Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror. Foreseeing the black and yellow room behind the eyelids, the children are bitter—from infancy. The blue egg of thirst: say hello. Foreseeing the lower lips of glaciers sliding toward their own lips, the children from infancy—are bitter. Them, rats, snakes: the chased and chasers. Foreseeing a dust-filled matchbox, the heart, the temples’ temples closing, the children are bitter—from infancy. From the marrow in the marrow: the start.

A boy who knew enough to save for something like the whim that took me downtown on the bus one lost Saturday morning of my mother’s birthday, I sat in the back where the gasoline smell made me dizzy and I closed my eyes but didn’t think of her, only of myself, basking in the light and love that would fall down on me when I handed her the box and she untied the bow to save and lifted something shining out and held it up before us like a promise taking shape for once in her hands, though I didn’t know what to buy, the bus door hissing behind me because I’m in some kind of state now, a trance that comes when you pull at the cords of light that connect the mother to the boy, the 1959 department store opening up before me like a jeweled city. In lingerie I found myself surrounded by those torsos sheened in silk, dreaming my mother, feeling the silk against me, the two of us moving through a cloudy room in a dance I can’t remember until shame comes. From out of nowhere the matron frowned, asked what I wanted, hovered over me. Confused and afraid I whispered, without thinking, The black hose with rhinestones down the seams please and pointed to the pair across the room stretched over legs on the glass counter as if about to step off and I saw her in my mind slip them on, her skirt hiked above the garters, the sun catching in her tangled hair until the matron made a sound in her throat and looked at me with eyes that said What’s wrong with you dirty boy. All the way home a sweet ache rocked me, the silver package riding my lap like a heavy wrong thing I couldn’t give up no matter how it dragged me down to a place where I could barely breathe or see or feel. Whatever happened that spinning afternoon— she ran her fingers over the rhinestone seams or she didn’t, she wore them out into an evening or kept them forever in her drawer of impossible things— doesn’t matter. I would find my way into the light of another woman into whose arms I fall nights my fingers can’t tear through the dark that eats me, the silk stretched across her breasts, the need for something womanly to raise me up pounding in my head until I curl in sleep away from those longings, ancient and blue.

Elm branches radiate green heat, blackbirds stiffly strut across fields. Beneath bedroom wood floor, I feel earth— bread in an oven that slowly swells, simmering my Navajo blanket thread-crust as white-feathered and corn-tasseled Corn Dancers rise in a line, follow my calf, vanish in a rumple and surface at my knee-cliff, chanting. Wearing shagged buffalo headgear, Buffalo Dancer chases Deer Woman across Sleeping Leg mountain. Branches of wild rose trees rattle seeds. Deer Woman fades into hills of beige background. Red Bird of my heart thrashes wildly after her. What a stupid man I have been! How good to let imagination go, step over worrisome events, those hacked logs tumbled about in the driveway. Let decisions go! Let them blow like school children’s papers against the fence, rattling in the afternoon wind. This Red Bird of my heart thrashes within the tidy appearance I offer the world, topples what I erect, snares what I set free, dashes what I’ve put together, indulges in things left unfinished, and my world is left, as children know, left as toys after dark in the sandbox.