260 Childhood poems

The two boys lean out on the railing of the front porch, looking up. Behind them they can hear their mother in one room watching “Name That Tune,” their father in another watching a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs turned up high and higher till they each can’t hear the other’s show. The older boy is saying that no matter how many stars you counted there were always more stars beyond them and beyond the stars black space going on forever in all directions, so that even if you flew up millions and millions of years you’d be no closer to the end of it than they were now here on the porch on Tuesday night in the middle of summer. The younger boy can think somehow only of his mother’s closet, how he likes to crawl in back behind the heavy drapery of shirts, nightgowns and dresses, into the sheer black where no matter how close he holds his hand up to his face there’s no hand ever, no face to hold it to. A woman from another street is calling to her stray cat or dog, clapping and whistling it in, and farther away deep in the city sirens now and again veer in and out of hearing. The boys edge closer, shoulder to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies, the older looking up, the younger as he thinks back straight ahead into the black leaves of the maple where the street lights flicker like another watery skein of stars. “Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite struggle like rough water to rise above each other. And the woman now comes walking in a nightgown down the middle of the street, clapping and whistling, while the older boy goes on about what light years are, and solar winds, black holes, and how the sun is cooling and what will happen to them all when it is cold.

for Edward Hirsch Like a distant singing, like a finger sizzling for just one moment on the iron, it almost hurts. Almost. But then something pulls away, and the smooth belly of evening slides over the earth; the pines and the spaniels stop howling and suddenly drop off to sleep. While the air is numb with the drowsiness of clouds, the needle sails free of the scars on the record and the record player lifts its artificial arm! This hurts. But then a boy lays his cards on his bedspread the way a sailor spreads his sails on the sand, and even this reminds me of tables being set, of a woman calling and calling her children through blistered hands. Then something lets go, and in her left palm she sees her own eyes, and in her right the evening’s first star pulls her toward the distant singing of the sky. Then something else lets go; the long sheet of night winds slowly through the pines. Here and there the lights go up, like a shy applauding.

When I was down beside the sea A wooden spade they gave to me To dig the sandy shore. My holes were empty like a cup. In every hole the sea came up Till it could come no more.

I wondered how long I could go on once the rain had stopped. My nerves were wedged like wings under a hat. Corncobs bobbed in boiling water. I kept a fist in my mouth. I was strident. The neat house curved like a draining sink. Hot cars shined outside. Their engines snapped like a chamois. I never wanted to leave. The streets were suet-thick. The hucksters had tinny voices. They had swollen drums. They had gravel underfoot and tongues that could peel citrus. Radios throbbed. The wet hush of my breath flung itself to mother. The soft dark skin. The sweet curl of the arm. The hum.

Winter mornings driving past I’d see these kids huddled like grouse in the plowed ruts in front of their shack waiting for the bus, three small children bunched against the drifts rising behind them. This morning I slowed to wave and the smallest, a stick of a kid draped in a coat, grinned and raised his red, raw hand, the snowball packed with rock aimed at my face.

Out in the yard, my sister and I tore thread from century plants to braid into bracelets, ate chalky green bananas, threw coconuts onto the sidewalk to crack their hard, hairy skulls. The world had begun to happen, but not time. We would live forever, sunburnt and pricker-stuck, our promises written in blood. Not yet would men or illness distinguish us, our thoughts cleave us in two. If she squeezed sour calamondins into a potion, I drank it. When I jumped from the fig tree, she jumped.

Saturday mornings, before my weekly chores, I used to sneak out of the house and across the street, grabbing the first grasshopper walking in the damp California grass along the stream. Carefully hiding a silver hook beneath its green wings, I'd float it out across the gentle ripples towards the end of its life. Just like that. I'd give it the hook and let it ride. All I ever expected for it was that big-mouth bass awaiting its arrival. I didn't think that I was giving up one life to get another, that even childhood was full of sacrifice. I'd just take the bright green thing, pluck it off its only stalk, and give it away as if it were mine to give. I knew someone out there would be fooled, that someone would accept the precious gift. So I just sent it along with a plea of a prayer, hoping it would spread its wings this time and fly across that wet glass sky, no concern for what inspired its life, or mine, only instinct guiding pain towards the other side.

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball. What, what is he to do? I saw it go Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then Merrily over—there it is in the water! No use to say 'O there are other balls': An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down All his young days into the harbour where His ball went. I would not intrude on him, A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now He senses first responsibility In a world of possessions. People will take balls, Balls will be lost always, little boy, And no one buys a ball back. Money is external. He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, The epistemology of loss, how to stand up Knowing what every man must one day know And most know many days, how to stand up And gradually light returns to the street, A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight. Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because She's only a metaphor for childhood And a poem is a metaphor already So we'd only have a metaphor Inside a metaphor. Do you see? They all nod. They see. Except for the girl With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage, Her bum looks like the flattened backside Of  a black and white panda. She actually has one In the crook of  her arm. Of course it's stuffed and not living. Who would dare hold a real bear so near the outer ear? She's wondering what possible harm might come to her If  she fell all the way down the dark she's looking through. Would strange creatures sing songs Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end. Perhaps the sounds would be a form of  light  hissing. Like when a walrus blows air Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree. Could she grow one from seed? Could one make a cat? Make it sit on a branch and fade away again The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing was rational thought With an axe beating on the forest door.

What I walked down to the highway for, through the summer dawn, was the Sunday funnies, or so I thought— but what I remember reading there in the shadowless light among meadowlarks singing was tracks in the deep warm dust of the lane, where it parted with its beige dryness the meadow’s dew— the sleek trail where a snake had crossed and slid into tall grass; the stippled parallels with marks between them where a black blister-beetle had dragged its bulbous belly across in search of weeds more green; the labyrinth of lacelike dimples left by a speed-freak tiger-beetles’s sprints that ended where it took wing with a little blur of dust-grains; and stepping through the beetle-trails, the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track crossing unhurried and walking along the ditch to find an easy place for climbing; not far past that, a line of cat-prints running straight down the lane and ending with deep marks where it leaped across the ditch to the meadow for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits: and freshly placed this morning, the slender runes of bob-whites running, scuffles of dustbaths taken— and there ahead crouched low at the lane-edge under purple pokeweed-berries four quail had seen me, and when I walked slowly on toward them, instead of flying they ran with a fluid scuttling on down the lane and stopped frozen till I came too close —then quietly when I expected an explosion of wings they took off low and whispering and sailed, rocking and tilting out over the meadow’s tall bluestem, dropped down and were gone until I heard them whistling, down by the little pond, and whistled back so sharply that when I got back to the  house they still were answering and one flew into the elm and whistled from its shadows up over the porch where I sat reading the funnies while the kittens played with the headlines till when the first gold sunlight tipped the elm’s leaves he flew back out to the meadow and sank down into the sun-brilliant dew on curving wings, and my brothers and sisters waked by the whistling came pouring out onto the porch and claimed their share of the Sunday funnies— and I went on to read the headlines of World War Two, with maps of the struggling armies leaving tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya and the navies churning their wakes of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea where the ships went down on fire and the waves bobbed and flamed with the maimed survivors , screaming in Japanese or English until their gasoline-blistered heads sank down to the tiger sharks and the war was lost or won for children sitting in sunlight, believing their cause was just and knowing it would prevail, as the dew vanished away.