260 Childhood poems

“I busy too,” the little boy said, lost in his book about a little boy, lost in his book, with nothing but a purple crayon and his wits to get him out. “Nobody can sit with me, I have no room. I busy too. So don’t do any noise. We don’t want any noise right now.” He leafs through once, leafs twice; the pictures, mixed with windy sighs, grow dizzy, world as difficult, high-drifting as the two-day snow that can not stop. How will the bushes, sinking deeper and deeper, trees and birds, wrapt up, ever creep out again? Any minute now the blizzard, scared and wild, the animals lost in it—O the fur, the red-eyed claws, crying for their home—may burst into the room. Try words he’s almost learned on them? He sighs, “I need a man here; I can’t do all this work alone.” And still, as though intent on reading its own argument, winter continues thumbing through itself.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe-- Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?" The old moon asked of the three. "We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!" Said Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe, And the wind that sped them all night long Ruffled the waves of dew. The little stars were the herring fish That lived in that beautiful sea-- "Now cast your nets wherever you wish-- Never afeard are we!" So cried the stars to the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. All night long their nets they threw To the stars in the twinkling foam--- Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, Bringing the fishermen home; 'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed As if it could not be, And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed Of sailing that beautiful sea--- But I shall name you the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, And Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies Is a wee one's trundle-bed. So shut your eyes while mother sings Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things As you rock in the misty sea, Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, And Nod.

from Sonnets, Second Series XXX Yet, even ‘mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes, Early my heart a deeper lesson learnt; Wandering alone by many a mile burnt Black woodside, that but the snow-flake decks and drapes. And I have stood beneath Canadian sky, In utter solitudes, where the cricket’s cry Appals the heart, and fear takes visible shapes; And on Long Island’s void and isolate capes Heard the sea break like iron bars: and still, In all, I seemed to hear the same deep dirge; Borne in the wind, the insect’s tiny trill, And crash and jangle of the shaking surge; And knew not what they meant,—prophetic woe? Dim bodings, wherefore? Now, indeed, I know!

Tennessee: We are here, between trees, with the tempo of a rosary being strung in a queue of escalating beads— Carolina: It’s not quite the count in the countinghouse of my chest but the heart does make an awful attempt t: and a circle wherever it may be there was music coming on c: which though machinery-like moves not in cogs, and never springs, but waves through t: like wired applause for antic backstage buds on the pre-comeuppance buzz; but it fades c: but only after the chorus has pulsed t: it drops off with sudden decision, like fountain water gone dross c: or it reaches the furthest point the branch turns from us, and is for some arc fully quiet... t: until the roulette snaps its jaw and the choir’s circuit opens to one c: like a pigeon unhinged, its wings in sudden white-rumped ascent t: unopposed by iridescence c: unopposed by iridescence

The mornings are his, blue and white like the tablecloth at breakfast. He’s happy in the house, a sweep of the spoon brings the birds under his chair. He sings and the dishes disappear. Or holding a crayon like a candle, he draws a circle. It is his hundredth dragonfly. Calling for more paper, this one is red-winged and like the others, he wills it to fly, simply by the unformed curve of his signature. Waterwings he calls them, the floats I strap to his arms. I wear an apron of concern, sweep the morning of birds. To the water he returns, plunging where it’s cold, moving and squealing into sunlight. The water from here seems flecked with gold. I watch the circles his small body makes fan and ripple, disperse like an echo into the sum of water, light and air. His imprint on the water has but a brief lifespan, the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing. This is sadness, I tell myself, the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind, because he will not remember that he and beauty were aligned, skimming across the water, nearly airborne, on his first solo flight. I’ll write “how he could not contain his delight.” At the other end, in another time frame, he waits for me— having already outdistanced this body, the one that slipped from me like a fish, floating, free of itself.

I wanted to know what it was like before we had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we had minds to move us through our actions and tears to help us over our feelings, so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her, walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek, and turned my head after them as an animal would, watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts, her smiling face and her small hand just visible over the giant pillows and coat hangers as they made their turn into the empty highway.

I.Deer Season The quiet of windows pours its sand in my ear. What, what? ask the dolls of evening though they do not wish to hear my answer. Five hens are alive in the brush, purring toward the slough. No one here has a rifle but the wind turns abruptly and returns a report. Three bright orange vests hang at the ready. The doe turns in her frame above the stove, and her season climbs like the moon into its place in the sky’s clock. The green theater with its elegant aspens goes more threadbare each week, so I’ll soon see the others, heretofore only heard. Just to the south the casino lights ride the underbellies of clouds, and further down the interstate more world twirls in its paper and drinks, while the baby throws his feet through the bars, and the father takes him like a little canoe on the billowy lake of his chest. Comes a mewling, then, from my dark, a mooing, a whine, feathered or furred I can’t divine. The girl with the flat face and bleached lips read her poems in crisp Ivy League whatnot, but I got sidetracked by the way her torso seemed stacked, pressed in layers like shale, so there was a weight to her that hung in the bottom of the eye like the bulk of a tear that never quite falls. It’s true the intelligence was clear as green ice, and just as hard, stripped of its I and heat. Her baby burbled on in the back of the room happily not in the poems. Oh little rabbit of grief on the spot where the last dog was turned under, don’t speak. I make a fire, then dream a fire: wind carries its gray rags into the woods, and the crackling in the grate enters my ducts, wakes me. When I look out, the grass along the fence is crawling with light, and the last wild asters press their blue buttons into the cold glass. II.The New Year Zero and a fine hard snow burns when it hits bare skin. A white ridge glows inside the birches across the slough where snow articulates the distance. Where water moves, where the land heaves. I haul oak chunks in a plastic sled. When I bend to stack the splits, my breasts pop and burn, and my child’s face rises like a bird razoring its shadow over the snow. Wind takes the rag of some old self and shakes it at me. The heart is only another shape the view stretches to include. Birches march out of the hardwoods with their white waists radiant, so many clones on one taproot. A jay circles the full feeders fending off smaller birds. I make this vocal gesture because self is simply one edge of me. Out here there’s only an economy of wood burned or to be burned, how much water’s left in the tank, how hard or soft the light. Degrees and drafts. This room and everything in it are mine, and though I try to be selfish and grim, my child has made me enduringly plural, more than I, but not quite we. Black-capped chickadees flee from three big jays at the feeder. Shrieking and diving in the strong winter light, the jays are not actually blue. Their feathers refract light so they appear blue. Self-luminous, hardy and belligerent as pronouns. III.Easter The kick of the screw finding purchase in pine slams my wrist bone, elbow and shoulder, but it’s in, and the panel is up. Now another and another until the wall is flush. I mark and cut each length with the small tooth of the new jigsaw my husband thought I should have. Two days apart from him and the child, I’ve forgotten the pump to empty my breasts, so the saw’s jump at the end of the cut draws the burning up. And with it a guilt as bright as the room where I drive plank after plank against the studs, each a satisfaction against the body’s wish to be elsewhere. Even into the night, I can’t put down my drill. I stoke the fire and drive more screws, loving the growl when they’re in as far as they’ll go. The mind arranging which planks and trim tomorrow, next week and spring. Even my sleep is a cutting and fastening broken by my turning on the full globes of my breasts. So toward morning I dream of parties given by women I used to know, and to which I’m not and will never be invited, trays of fancy sandwiches and petit fours, half moon glasses of seething champagne.

I was the child that passed long hours away Chopping red beetroot in the hay-piled barn; Now must I spend the wind-blown April day Minding great looms and tying knots in yarn. Once long ago I tramped through rain and slush In brown waves breaking up the stubborn soil, I wove and wove the twilight’s purple hush To fold about the furrowed heart of toil. Strange fires and frosts burnt out the seasons’ dross, I watched slow Powers the woven cloth reveal, While God stood counting out His gain and loss, And Day and Night pushed on the heavy wheel. Held close against the breast of living Powers A little pulse, yet near the heart of strife, I followed the slow plough for hours and hours Minding through sun and shower the loom of life. The big winds, harsh and clear and strong and salt, Blew through my soul and all the world rang true, In all things born I knew no stain or fault, My heart was soft to every flower that grew. The cabbages in my small garden patch Were rooted in the earth’s heart; wings unseen Throbbed in the silence under the dark thatch, And brave birds sang long ere the boughs were green.

At six I lived for spells: how a few Hawaiian words could call up the rain, could hymn like the sea in the long swirl of chambers curling in the nautilus of a shell, how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland in the drone of the priest’s liturgy could conjure money from the poor and give them nothing but mantras, the strange syllables that healed desire. I lived for stories about the war my grandfather told over hana cards, slapping them down on the mats with a sharp Japanese kiai. I lived for songs my grandmother sang stirring curry into a thick stew, weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love into grass mats and straw sandals. I lived for the red volcano dirt staining my toes, the salt residue of surf and sea wind in my hair, the arc of a flat stone skipping in the hollow trough of a wave. I lived in a child’s world, waited for my father to drag himself home, dusted with blasts of sand, powdered and the strange ash of raw cement, his deafness made worse by the clang of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones from the buckings of a jackhammer. He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail, let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots, call him the new name I’d invented that day in school, write it for him on his newspaper. He’d rub my face with hands that felt like gravel roads, tell me to move, go play, an then he’d walk to the laundry sink to scrub, rinse the dirt of his long day from a face brown and grained as koa wood. I wanted to take away the pain in his legs, the swelling in his joints, give him back his hearing, clear and rare as crystal chimes, the fins of glass that wrinkled and sparked the air with their sound. I wanted to heal the sores that work and war had sent to him, let him play catch in the backyard with me, tossing a tennis ball past papaya trees without the shoulders of pain shrugging back his arms. I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic, to string a necklace of sweet words fragrant as pine needles and plumeria, fragrant as the bread my mother baked, place it like a lei of cowrie shells and pikake flowers around my father’s neck, and chant him a blessing, a sutra.

Down the prickly cow path to the creek we journeyed as if we were insects making our way along scars in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses down the prickly cow path to the creek in chigger-shade where thoughts of time making our way along scars lost what they meant up at the house when the wind passed like a tide across the high grasses we pulled from our pockets matches swiped in chigger-shade where thoughts of time tasting of sulfur at the tips lost what they meant up at the house listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles we pulled from our pockets matches swiped the surface of the water trembling tasting of sulfur at the tips once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them listening to bug-hum and bird-chatter and watching bubbles then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine the surface of the water trembling the prairie had been a giant sea he told us once by the creek we found rocks with shells in them Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said then carried the rocks back for Uncle Ralph to examine none of us sure what we believed the prairie had been a giant sea he told us we journeyed as if we were insects Grandma June says everything was sky not sea I said in the hide of a buffalo whose fur brushed us none of us sure what we believed