209 Nostalgia poems

from Sonnets, Third Series V How well do I recall that walk in state Across the Common, by the paths we knew: Myself in silver badge and riband blue, My little sister with her book and slate; The elm tree by the Pond, the fence of wood, The burial place that at the corner stood Where once we crossed, through the forbidden grate, The stones that grudg’d us way, the graveside weed, The ominous wind that turned us half about. Smit the flying drops, at what a speed Across the paths, unblessed and unforgiven We hurried homeward when the day was late And heard, with awe that left no place for doubt, God’s anger mutter in the darkened heaven.

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic? The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms strolling the streets and alleys, while loudspeakers declared a new era, and the house around you grew bigger, the rooms farther apart, with more and more people missing? The photographs whispered to each other from their frames in the hallway. The cooking pots said your name each time you walked past the kitchen. And you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. You learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled safety of a wing. Look! In run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china. Don’t fall asleep. Each act opens with your mother reading a letter that makes her weep. Each act closes with your father fallen into the hands of Pharaoh. Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you, still a child, and slow to grow. Still talking to God and thinking the snow falling is the sound of God listening, and winter is the high-ceilinged house where God measures with one eye an ocean wave in octaves and minutes, and counts on many fingers all the ways a child learns to say Me. Which childhood? The one from which you’ll never escape? You, so slow to know what you know and don’t know. Still thinking you hear low song in the wind in the eaves, story in your breathing, grief in the heard dove at evening, and plentitude in the unseen bird tolling at morning. Still slow to tell memory from imagination, heaven from here and now, hell from here and now, death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.

But sometimes I forget where I am, Imagine myself inside that life again. Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps, Or more likely colorless light Filtering its way through shapeless cloud. And when I begin to believe I haven’t left, The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke Climbing the walls while the hours fall. Straining against the noise of traffic, music, Anything alive, to catch your key in the door. And that scamper of feeling in my chest, As if the day, the night, wherever it is I am by then, has been only a whir Of something other than waiting. We hear so much about what love feels like. Right now, today, with the rain outside, And leaves that want as much as I do to believe In May, in seasons that come when called, It’s impossible not to want To walk into the next room and let you Run your hands down the sides of my legs, Knowing perfectly well what they know.

One day the children played in the kitchen. in the cellar. in the yard. The yard looked like a meadow. a forest. an island in the sea. The children forgot their mud cakes, swing set, sticks, when a girl taught them cat’s cradles. clay people. folded paper boats. Late afternoon, whispering, they lay in a sandbox. on the sidewalk. in the grass. Each knew the others had a mother. a father. brothers, sisters, dogs. They traded blood oaths that foretold how close. how long. at what cost.

Sometimes we blubbered through the fallout of willful confusion in pants that didn’t fit the legs we sawed off. We looked at each other and fell forward and back, forward and back, a little bit like dancing and a little like aggravated assault. At times it seemed reasonable because it always seems reasonable to accept whatever anxieties or losses must accumulate in the face of what we really wanted all along. In buildings and on streets you could paint a few eyes on a face and see the careless representation of brothers and sisters making a family out of paint and the gracious mistakes of seeing. Mistakes, the essence of sight, could have been all we had to go on anyway, and not for us to leave behind what took us through the shower of dumbasses with tact and a breath of elegance, even the hope that later, when the streets cleared of agitated needlers and the AC kicked on for good, we could sleep on the clothes spangled outside the closet and find a reason for closing the bedroom door on shadows of pedantic radiation from thin margins of lamplight always suggesting some other plot in some other bedroom, tensions to splay us soon enough. And then it occurred to you, or maybe it occurred to me, doesn’t matter, I think actually someone called and said that anyone who doesn’t leave something for you isn’t worth having, so maybe now's a good time to find a dapper little high school where everyone can be a little less civil, and blessed with selfishness, we could part the fingers interlocked between us, make fists and get busy. Then intensity fermented into green books of music, loud country music, and I love country music. It rolled around my ears in corridors where boredom had once been so irrefutable and heavy, and I was happy and dancing and throwing punches at pigeons and even hitting a few. But the romantic arc never made it over the willful lack of conviction, some gap between the faces on the heads we saw pass our table in the sour-faced restaurant run by those French people, okay a gap between that and the face in the dream you had of your father, the one where you said he stuffed a billy club down a duck’s throat and called for another shot of Dewar’s. I expected you to take things when you left, but not those things. Light diffuses evenly across the kitchen, blood through my body, and it’s sort of funny, but our whole thing fits between two haircuts, like a roadtrip or something. I feel now that I’ve been digested by time, and light would pool into terrible reflections of my own back as I backed into a mirror or performed some other forgetful jujitsu, an effort to lose thoughts or patterns of thought, but the light diffuses and you walk through it, collide with little pieces of what ate you, get angry and write long letters about how your hand can’t talk, how the paper is so light and effortless when you hold it how could you even know, you couldn’t even imagine holding this light and ridiculous thing that my hand brushed over in patterns it will later try to forget. Then I taped my mouth shut and tried to whistle. Leave me alone. Don’t call. Get lost, dumpster of confusion. I know it’s never been that easy, that from the eyes in your skull the black plastic bags were suffocating the trees even though to me it was more like a ballerina’s shadow had escaped and was dancing through the branches frantically with desperate happiness and cause for alarm. I guess either way something unsafe and ridiculous was happening, and I guess we knew it, I think we even talked about it, but I’ve been a little lonely since I started writing my dissertation. It’s about class consciousness among people who work behind registers. And it’s interesting, there’s all kinds of different races and classes and income levels represented in the world of cashiers, but at the level of values we see predominantly two classes, the complacent and the entitled, though many cashiers are some measure of both. The complacent are resigned to what they understand to be their position. They’re courteous and reliable; class issues only arise when people are rude to them, which they tend to handle fine, though if they say anything about it afterwards, it tends to be a cruel and brief dismissal not only of the occurrence, but of the entire offending person. The entitled have a very complicated expression of social hierarchy. Because they see themselves in transition, usually ascending, there’s this idea that their values won’t, or can’t, find full expression from their current position and so they don’t feel compelled to act in a way consistent with their values, while at the same time they may expect to be treated in accordance with those values. When people are rude to them, they flip out. Basically today’s been pasted together from the leavings of some green intensity and cigarettes crowded at the back of the passive classrooms of the skull. Will there be coffee on the other side? Will there be ladies to walk up to you on a plain old shit-for-brains day and ask you of Washington Square Park, “Why is this on the map?” I like it when people cock their heads a little when you talk. Seems elegant. I tell them I’m not sure, but Henry James wrote something complicated about it. Then these nice ladies with a telling lack of accent move along into non-history and the bulk of our hours waiting without a mind for restitution. I would surrender our moist telephone calls and arthritic tribes of entitlement if I knew who to give them up to. I never go anywhere or do anything slow because revision is only a function of doubt. Well okay, maybe doubt and shame. Actually, it’s just shame. Revision is a function of shame. But enough of these dead people, we must rise like blood in April! Instead here I am peeling seconds off the end of my life, glass of water, frown on face, notebook open to the parade of minutes and obvious as a daisycutter in the desert. No more nights in the kitchen or bowls of macaroni, no more misdemeanors with the microwave or blue orbs whistling into my ear, no more cats meowing at the television, no cigarettes on the patio, no more blessings in drag. My schedule is totally blank this afternoon.

I never saw that land before, And now can never see it again; Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar Endeared, by gladness and by pain, Great was the affection that I bore To the valley and the river small, The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees, The chickens from the farmsteads, all Elm-hidden, and the tributaries Descending at equal interval; The blackthorns down along the brook With wounds yellow as crocuses Where yesterday the labourer’s hook Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze That hinted all and nothing spoke. I neither expected anything Nor yet remembered: but some goal I touched then; and if I could sing What would not even whisper my soul As I went on my journeying, I should use, as the trees and birds did, A language not to be betrayed; And what was hid should still be hid Excepting from those like me made Who answer when such whispers bid.

I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day, But now, I often wish the night Had borne my breath away! I remember, I remember, The roses, red and white, The vi'lets, and the lily-cups, Those flowers made of light! The lilacs where the robin built, And where my brother set The laburnum on his birthday,— The tree is living yet! I remember, I remember, Where I was used to swing, And thought the air must rush as fresh To swallows on the wing; My spirit flew in feathers then, That is so heavy now, And summer pools could hardly cool The fever on my brow! I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now 'tis little joy To know I'm farther off from heav'n Than when I was a boy.

I remember nights of playing Lotería w/Mom & Big Manny as a way to learn the Spanish they spoke to each other but not to their kids who caught on to certain words like cállate,cerveza,chicharrón; little nuggets I ate up like the pinto beans we used instead of the blue chips Mom kept in her Bingo bag she carried every Friday night when her & Tia Shirley went to the Moose Lodge, her hair & coat reeking w/the smoke of all who lost. I remember El Borracho, the man always holding a bottle & about to fall over yet never does like Big Manny stumbling home late at night after a payday, breath & belly full of beer, who one time took a piss in our bedroom. I remember La Garza, not for the heron it is but cousin Tony & his kids, nights of sleepovers & pizza, PlayStation on a 40-inch TV, the night he & Lil Jesse sneaked bumps of coke in the bathroom & I rubbed numb my teenage teeth. I remember El Musico, not the chubby man clutching his guitarra but my brother Dave loading crates of records & a dual turntable case like a coffin into the back of a van, the same set I hit my back on at ten when I fell out of the top bunk bed. But I prefer to remember La Sirena back when her breasts were free of the seashells she now holds to cover them in water so blue cold, her scales so red, her name clung to the tongue like dulce de leche.

I don’t know. I still can’t get it right, the way those dirt roads cut across the flats and led to shacks where hounds and muddy shoats skulked roundabouts. Describing it sounds trite as hell, the good old South I love to hate. The truth? What’s that? How should I know? I stayed inside too much. I learned to boast of stupid things. I kept my ears shut tight, as we kept doors locked, windows locked, the curtains drawn. Now I know why. The dark could hide things from us. Dark could see what we could not. Sometimes those dirt roads shocked me, where they ended up: I watched a dog die in the ditch. The man who shot him winked at me.

I used to love the run-up to a storm, watching from the porch as the grown-ups hurried to bring things in, my mother rummaging through drawers for a flashlight, cursing: nothing was where it was supposed to be in our house. It can’t be so, but the only people I ever remember huddled in the basement were my mother and me, suspended in that eerie half-light like bats. We’ve just spent a week like this, my mother perched in a chair above the water keeping watch for the next bad thing. We were happy so sometimes she’d let the vigil rest, the sentry of her shoulders easing to a more receptive pose, a quarter moon, until something called her back to the watch, mother first no longer but this white, foremost light. You can read by it. You can see.