260 Childhood poems

The wheels on the bus go round and round, Round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round, All day long. The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish ... The horn on the bus goes beep!   beep!   beep! ... The people on the bus go chat, chat, chat ... The children on the bus bump up and down ...

The night Max wore his wolf suit made him infamous, bred the child star never sent to bed. Middle school, Max started drinking.Not in my house, his mother begged,No, no, no, wild thing. Max reminded her who bought this condo, who paid for her meds. Freshman year, Max raved. Roared his terrible roar, rolled, and almost wound up in a warehouse dead. Where, oh where, do the wild things go? To rehab in high school. To college on residual book sales. Max kept his head down. Laughed at drunken frat boys.Bro, let the wild rumpus start.

You could whistle me home from anywhere in the neighborhood; avenues away, I’d pick out your clear, alternating pair of notes, the signal to quit my child’s play and run back to our house for supper, or a Saturday trip to the hardware store. Unthrottled, wavering in the upper reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther than our few blocks. I’ve learned too, how your heart’s radius extends, though its beat has stopped. Still, some days a sudden fear darts through me, whether it’s my own city street I hurry across, or at a corner in an unknown town: the high, vacant air arrests me—where’s home?

For Russ I’ll tell you, if you really want to know: remember that day you lost two years ago at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore? Most of them went dark and nothing more, but sometimes one would blink the secret color it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep. This is how you knew the ones to keep. So I collect the dull things of the day in which I see some possibility but which are dead and which have the surprise I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell— so I look at them and look at them until one thing makes a mirror in my eyes then I paint it with the tear to make it bright. This is why I sit up through the night.

5pm on the nose. They open their mouths And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic. First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally, They both let loose at once, and I think Of putting on my shoes to go up and see Whether it is merely an experiment Their parents have been conducting Upon the good crystal, which must surely Lie shattered to dust on the floor. Maybe the mother is still proud Of the four pink lungs she nursed To such might. Perhaps, if they hit The magic decibel, the whole building Will lift-off, and we'll ride to glory Like Elijah. If this is it—if this is what Their cries are cocked toward—let the sky Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold, To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach. Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes, Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space. Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father, Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready To meet what refuses to let us keep anything For long. What teases us with blessings, Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor, To sweep our short lives clean. How mean Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle. The neighbor chopping onions through a wall. All of it just a hiccough against what may never Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it, Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something They have no name for has begun to insist Upon being born.

A charm, a dream of protection. Gurgles hold the night light’s glow. A stream of clouds misting the branching tubes. Water, in fog, a tub, plug to wire in the wall saying Okay, it’s okay all night. *    *    * School, a door closing he opens: haze of playground French, the five names for different kinds of marbles, games, bullies he wandered among while I was staring at the sea. Shut off, not my past, nothing I could do— I keep making up all the world he lived. His new name, intricate drawings of aliens, long tunnel of lunch (Mais il ne mange rien monsieur)— school hours shadows that smother my days. *    *    * Burnt-out hills: char and velvety ash along the dropped limbs, magpies, new gullies. A dry time clears the ground. He was standing where the road split, arms spread, a small x straddling the crack. That bird call a slash, then, on the edge of things. He was standing, behind him the green blue of ocean, the white blue of sky. *    *    * The house of childhood sold, or razed— not lost but softened, distended: diaphanous linked chambers springing from a lightshaft or a varnish smell, the way a floorboard aches, a scrap of wallpaper tunnels the heart. *    *    * A film of “events”— tiny collisions, tracks of light in the bubble chamber—you’d scan for hours (smell of formica, rock headsets, eyes going furry near four AM). This celluloid memory now your memory, coursing chemical fissures in the brain. Matter split like time, thinner and thinner parings— Anything that happens is too fast to see *    *    * There the sky kept reeling as she ran— wisps, then puffy clumps, then rain— the park spread low beneath the blanketing. Who could have worn that purple coat cartwheeling in the grass? It grows as I look at it, puts on pillowy layers. Now the coat wears memory, warms a ghost. *    *    * Wind off the world’s top, whipped clouds over hedgerows: Girton, that one year twenty years away. He learned to walk, she started school, read, slowly, the first book Red. Moss edging the garden wall, little flags on the clothesline.

(To Saul Touster) I. January 22, 1932 Could a four-year-old look out of a square sedan (A Studebaker Six in currency green With wooden artillery wheels) and see a scene Of snow, light lavender, landing on deepening blue Buildings built out of red-violet bricks, and black Passersby passing by over the widening white Streets darkening blue, under a thickening white Sky suddenly undergoing sheer twilight, And the yellow but whitening streetlights coming on, And remember it now, though the likelihood is gone That it ever happened at all, and the Village is gone That it ever could happen in? Memory, guttering out, Apparently, finally flares up and banishes doubt. II. May 29, 1941 Tring. Bells On grocers’ boys’ bicycles ring, Followed, on cue, By the jaunty one-note of prayers at two Near churches; taxi horns, a-hunt, Come in for treble; next, the tickety bass Of chain-driven Diamond T’s, gone elephantine And stove-enamelled conifer green Down Greenwich Avenue. Out of the Earle I issue at half-past thirteen, Struck, like a floral clock, By seasonal Manifestations: unreasonable N.Y.U. girls out in their bobby socks And rayon blouses; meek boys with their books Who have already moulted mackinaws; Desarrolimiento of New chrome-green leaves; a rose, Got, blooming, out of bed; and Mrs. Roos- Evelt and Sarah Delano Descending the front stoop of a Jamesian House facing south against the Square, the sun— Who, curveting, his half course not yet run, Infects the earth with crescence; And the presence Of process, seen in un-top-hatted, Un-frock-coated burghers and their sons And daughters, taking over All title, right, and interest soever In this, now their Property, Washington Square. III. December 29, 1949 The Hotel Storia ascends Above me and my new wife; ends Eight stories of decline, despair, Iron beds and hand-washed underwear Above us and our leatherette Chattels, still grounded on the wet Grey tessellated lobby floor. Soon, through a dingy, numbered door, We’ll enter into our new home, Provincials in Imperial Rome To seek their fortune, or, at least, To find a job. The wedding feast, Digested and metabolized, Diminishes in idealized Group photographs, and hard today Shunts us together and at bay. Outside the soot-webbed window, sleet Scourges the vista of Eighth Street; Inside, the radiators clack And talk and tell us to go back Where we came from. A lone pecan Falls from our lunch, a sticky bun, And bounces on the trampoline Of the torn bedspread. In the mean Distance of winter, a man sighs, A bedstead creaks, a woman cries. IV. July 14, 1951 A summer lull arrives in the West Village, Transmuting houses into silent salvage Of the last century, streets into wreckage Uncalled-for by do-gooders who police The moderniqueness of our ways, patrol The sanitation of the urban soul. What I mean is, devoid of people, all Our dwellings freeze and rust in desuetude, Fur over with untenancy, glaze grey With summer’s dust and incivility, With lack of language and engagement, while Their occupants sport, mutate, and transform Themselves, play at dissembling the god Norm From forward bases at Fire Island. But— Exception proving rules, dissolving doubt— Young Gordon Walker, fledgling editor, My daylong colleague in the corridors Of Power & Leicht, the trade-book publishers, Is at home to the residue in his Acute apartment in an angle of Abingdon Square. And they’re all there, the rear- Guard of the garrison of Fort New York: The skeleton defense of skinny girls Who tap the typewriters of summertime; The pale male workers who know no time off Because too recently employed; the old Manhattan hands, in patched and gin-stained tweeds; The writers (Walker’s one), who see in their City as desert an oasis of Silence and time to execute their plots Against the state of things, but fall a prey To day succeeding day alone, and call A party to restore themselves to all The inside jokes of winter, in whose caul People click, kiss like billiard balls, and fall, Insensible, into odd pockets. Dense As gander-feather winter snow, intense As inextinguishable summer sun At five o’clock (which it now is), the noise Of Walker’s congeries of girls and boys Foregathered in their gabbling gratitude Strikes down the stairwell from the altitude Of his wide-open walk-up, beckoning Me, solo, wife gone north, to sickening Top-story heat and talk jackhammering Upon the anvils of all ears. “Christ, Lou, you’re here,” Whoops Walker, topping up a jelly jar (“Crabapple,” says the label, still stuck on) With gin and tonic, a blue liquid smoke That seeks its level in my unexplored Interior, and sends back a sonar ping To echo in my head. Two more blue gins. The sweat that mists my glasses interdicts My sizing up my interlocutor, Who is, I think, the girl who lives next door, A long-necked, fiddleheaded, celliform Girl cellist propped on an improbably Slim leg. Gin pings are now continuous. The room swings in its gimbals. In the bath Is silence, blessed, relative, untorn By the cool drizzle of the bathtub tap, A clear and present invitation. Like A climber conquering K.28, I clamber over the white porcelain Rock face, through whitish veils of rubberized Shower curtain, and at length, full-dressed, recline In the encaustic crater, where a fine Thread of cold water irrigates my feet, To sleep, perchance to dream of winter in The Village, fat with its full complement Of refugees returned to their own turf— Unspringy as it is—in a strong surf Of retrogressing lemmings, faces fixed On the unlovely birthplace of their mixed Emotions, marriages, media, and met- Aphors. Lord God of hosts, be with them yet.

When I was two feet tall and held the hand above, how could I know how far that limping bond would go, that finger-inch of love.

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies, with their squirt guns and snorkels, their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales, are still too young to understand that this is as good as it gets. Soon they must leave the wading pool and stand all day at the concession stand with their hormones and snow cones, their soul patches and tribal tattoos, pretending not to notice how beautiful they are, until they simply can’t stand it and before you know it they’re lined up on lawn chairs, dozing in the noonday sun with their stretch marks and beer bellies, their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

Blurring the window, the snowflakes' numb white lanterns. She's brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne And sets her lipstick upright on the sink. The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip, The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder. Then she's dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur, And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop Where she'll leave me for my own walk to school, Where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul As I watch her at the window, the paperback Romance already open on her lap, The bus laboring off into snow, her good-bye kiss Still startling my cheek with lipstick trace.