260 Childhood poems

The plastic army men are always green. They’re caught in awkward poses, one arm outstretched as if to fire, legs parted and forever stuck on a swiggle of support, as rigid and green as the boots. This one has impressions of pockets, a belt, a collar, a grip on tiny binoculars intended to enlarge, no doubt, some tiny enemy. In back, attached to the belt is a canteen or a grenade (it’s hard to tell). The helmet is pulled down low, so as to hide the eyes. If I point the arm, the gun, toward me, I see that this soldier is very thin. It’s almost unreal, how thin he is.

What is pink? a rose is pink By a fountain's brink. What is red? a poppy's red In its barley bed. What is blue? the sky is blue Where the clouds float thro'. What is white? a swan is white Sailing in the light. What is yellow? pears are yellow, Rich and ripe and mellow. What is green? the grass is green, With small flowers between. What is violet? clouds are violet In the summer twilight. What is orange? Why, an orange, Just an orange!

If you subtract the minor losses, you can return to your childhood too: the blackboard chalked with crosses, the math teacher’s toe ring. You can be the black boy not even the buck- toothed girls took a liking to: this match box, these bones in their funk machine, this thumb worn smooth as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump. Thump. Everything I hold takes root. I remember what the world was like before I heard the tide humping the shore smooth, and the lyrics asking:How long has your door been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung like a snake around a thigh in the shadows of a wedding gown before it was flung out into the bluest part of the night. Suppose you were nothing but a song in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe sweat from the brow of a righteous woman, but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why the blues will never go out of fashion: their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in trouble. Especially if you love as I love falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love watching the sky regret nothing but its self, though only my lover knows it to be so, and only after watching me sit and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No for its prudence, but I love the romantic who submits finally to sex in a burning row- house more. That’s why nothing’s more romantic than working your teeth through the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic than the way good love can take leave of you. That’s why I’m so doggone lonesome, Baby, yes, I’m lonesome and I’m blue.

Children under, say,ten, shouldn't know that the universe is ever-expanding, inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies swallowed by galaxies, whole solar systems collapsing, all of it acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning the rules of cartoon animation, that if a man draws a door on a rock only he can pass through it. Anyone else who tries will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds should stick with burning houses, car wrecks, ships going down—earthbound, tangible disasters, arenas where they can be heroes. You can run back into a burning house, sinking ships have lifeboats, the trucks will come with their ladders, if you jump you will be saved. A child places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus, & drives across a city of sand. She knows the exact spot it will skid, at which point the bridge will give, who will swim to safety & who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff he will not fall until he notices his mistake.

A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play— For May is here once more, and so is he,— His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee, And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they: Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me Of woody pathways winding endlessly Along the creek, where even yesterday He plunged his shrinking body—gasped and shook— Yet called the water "warm," with never lack Of joy. And so, half enviously I look Upon this graceless barefoot and his track,— His toe stubbed—ay, his big toe-nail knocked back Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook.

All summer the patio drifted in and out of light the color of margarine; days were blue, not always sky blue. At night the word Algeria circulated among the grown-ups. A patient of my father had whooping cough, the words drifted into summer blue. The evenings spun into stadium lights. Kennedy’s hair blew across the screen. Castro was just a sofa. I saw James Meredith’s face through a spread of leaves on the evening news. The fridge sweat with orangeade, the trees whooped some nights in rain— a kid down the street kept coughing into his mitt. Static sounds from Comiskey and Fenway came though the vinyl, the plastic, the pillow— So when it left Stallard’s hand, when Roger Maris’s arms whipped the bat and the bullet-arc carried into the chasm the disaffections at 344 ft. near the bullpen fence under the green girder holding up the voices rising into the façade and over the river where a Baptist choir on Lenox Ave. was sending up a variation of Sweet Chariot into the traffic on the FDR that was jammed at the Triboro where a derrick was broken and the cables of its arms picked up the star-blast of voices coming over the Stadium façade spilling down the black next-game sign into the vector of a tilted Coke bottle on a billboard at the edge of the river where a cloud of pigeons rose over Roosevelt Island. It was evening by the time the cars unjammed and the green of the outfield unfroze and the white arc had faded into skyline before fall came full of boys throwing themselves onto the turf with inexplicable desire for the thing promised. The going. Then gone.

I I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. II I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy— Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. III And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age— For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler's heritage— And had that colour upon cheek or hair, And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child. IV Her present image floats into the mind— Did Quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once—enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. V What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? VI Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. VII Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise— O self-born mockers of man's enterprise; VIII Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Wee Willie Winkie Rins through the toun, Up stairs and doun stairs In his nicht-gown, Tirling at the window, Crying at the lock, “Are the weans in their bed, For it’s now ten o’clock? “Hey, Willie Winkie, Are ye coming ben? The cat’s singing grey thrums To the sleeping hen, The dog’s spelder’d on the floor, And disna gie a cheep, But here’s a waukrife laddie That winna fa’ asleep.” Onything but sleep, you rogue! Glow’ring like the moon, Rattling in an airn jug Wi’ an airn spoon, Rumblin’, tumblin’, round about, Crawing like a cock, Skirlin’ like a kenna-what, Wauk’nin’ sleeping folk. “Hey, Willie Winkie – The wean’s in a creel! Wamblin’ aff a body’s knee Like a very eel, Ruggin’ at the cat’s lug, Rav’llin’ a’ her thrums – Hey, Willie Winkie – See, there he comes!” Wearied is the mither That has a stoorie wean, A wee stumpie stousie, That canna rin his lane. That has a battle aye wi’ sleep, Before he’ll close an e’e – But a kiss frae aff his rosy lips Gies strength anew to me.

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children— a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them, in a chair near a window, their father thinks of his mother, her recent death and the grief he is trying to gather. It is late October. The hooplight spreads from the family, through the window, to the edge of a small orchard, where a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves and only apples hang, heavy and still on the branches. The man looks from the window, down to a scrapbook of facts he is reading. The spider is proven to have memory, he says, and his son, once again, cocks his small face to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if this is some riddle he is slowly approaching, as if this long hour, troubled with phrases and the queer turn in his father's voice, is offered as a riddle. There is the sound of marbles in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery jump of the girl's shoe as she waits, embarrassed, for her father to stop, to return to his known self, thick and consistent as a family bread. But still he continues, plucking scraps from his old book, old diary of wonders: the vanishing borders of mourning paper, the ghostly shape in the candled egg, beak and eye etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw. A little sleet scrapes at the window. The man blinks, sees his hand on the page as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over the playboard, with the careful pattern of their lives dropping softly away, like leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers, and after each phrase the guttural oh, and the left shoe jumping.

woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y Vietnam woodstove corner that kept vigil over drunken nodding remembrance woodstove corner where uncles primos compadres gathered on visits from Califas woodstove corner with a warm ear for nostalgia where Mama Ane stirred the atole and wrung her hands thumb over thumb praying for her children's children's children woodstove that witnessed six decades washing its face at the vandeja that saw western swing dancing in dim lantern flame that watched Elvis come in from across the llano strumming a mail-order Stella and singing in Spanish woodstove of the feast lamb tied up under the crabapple tree of early sour cherries ripening above the cornstalk horizon of neighbors bartering a cup of sugar in exchange for mitote and conversation woodstove of rain tenderly pouring into the afternoon and salt sprinkling onto the patio from the mouth of the porch woodstove of the nighttime crackling softly of harmonious harmonica medleys blowing before bedtime prayer woodstove facing John F. Kennedy's picture on the wall woodstove of Protestant Sundays ringing without bells woodstove of dark earth fat worms and acequias woodstove of 1960s propaganda and all the rich hippies knocking poorly at the screen door woodstove of private crazy laughter of woodpeckers pecking through rough-hewn barn timbers only to meet the sky of rabbits nervously nibbling evening away in the arroyo of the water bucket banging and splashing all the way home woodstove of the water drop sizzle of buñuelos and biscochitos and flour on the chin of chokecherry jam dropping out from the end of a tortilla woodstove that heard Mentorcito's violin bringing in the new year that saw Tío Eliseo bring in an armload of wood that heard Tío Antonio coming down the road whistling a corrido and swinging his cane woodstove of the blessed noontime and Grandma Juanita heating up the caldito woodstove of the sanctified and untamed holy spirit of the dream awake dreamers prophesizing in the beginning how the end would come of creaking trochil gates left open forever of twisted caved-in gallineros rocking in weeping April wind of abandoned orchards waist deep in desánimo of teardrops that held back the laughter of the penitente procession moving through the hills for the soul of the village woodstove of the wounded faithful proudly concealing their scars woodstove of armpit farts and bedtime giggles of pitchforks and axes under the bed in case of intruders of coffee cans filled with everything but coffee of ten cents for a cream soda at Corrina's of strawberry Nehis and a bag of chili chips at Medina's of a handful of bubble gum acá Santos's woodstove of genius wisdom dressed up as the village idiot of hand-me-down stories locked away in the dispensa of bien loco local heroes cracking homeruns Saturday afternoons en la cañada woodstove of all that and more of all that disappearing as children played hide 'n' seek in that abandoned goodtime feeling while stumbling on the footsteps of tradition woodstove that heard the fall of a people rising in silence that died of a loneliness without cure that cured itself in the company of the so many more lonely woodstove of my childhood