from Paragraphs from a Day-Book

For Hayden Carruth Thought thrusts up, homely as a hyacinth wrapped in its bulb like a root-vegetable, a ninth-month belly, where the green indelible pattern's inscribed into the labyrinth. Thrust into light, it's air's inhabitant with light and air as food and drink. A hyacinth, tumescent pink on the low wooden Mexican chest confronts the wintry dusk with informed self-interest. Leaf-spears extravagantly ask what idea, still gnarled up in a knot of ganglions, will break through the husk shaped at last, recognizable as thought. • Trace, on a city map, trajectories of partially-forgotten words along the river's arteries, volatile substance of a sentient world. Mauve heather crowds the window-grill. The light lingers a little later, with a slight vernal inflection. In a moon-glazed vase bloom yellow freesias, like some rainy day's brook-bank, in someone else's memory. Small whirlpools of perception widen, ring an infant's numinous discoveries of syllables for animals, toys, trees: a Lab's thick coat, the dusty birds in Claremont Park each tardy urban spring, a stuffed pink leather horse with button eyes. • A question-mark in yellow overalls, I could read. I was three. I slept with that pink horse. My one doll's name was V. J. She'd been given to me to celebrate the Victory over Japan, that is to say, the Bomb I'd spend my schooldays taking shelter from. I couldn't tie my shoes. But Reddy the fox, Tootle the engine who jumped off the tracks, spelled me their stories on my mother's lap despite weak eyes and poor small-motor skills. My grandparents were dead: not in pogroms, not in the camps—of strokes and heart attacks, merely immigrants, not deportees. "When you die, does everything just stop?" • I'm four, in itchy woolen leggings, the day that I can't recognize the man down at the park entrance, waving, as my father. He has ten more years to live, that spring. Dapper and balding he walks toward me; then I run toward him, calling him, flustered by my flawed vision. Underfoot, the maples' green- winged seeds splay on mica-specked octagons. His round face, thin nose, moustache silvered gray at thirty-eight look (I think now) Hungarian. I like his wood-smell of two packs a day as he swings me up to his shoulder and I say, things look blurry far away —one Saturday, two years after the war.