209 Nostalgia poems

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles. Dr. Johnson No one keeps a secret so well as a child Victor Hugo My mother stands at the screen door, laughing. “Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog. I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved like this. The air is tight to my nervous body. I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing to myself all day like a fieldful of August insects, just things I whisper, really, a trance in sneakers. I’m learning to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school, I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself, a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road- side park. I love to be called for dinner. Spot goes out and I go in and the lights in the kitchen go on and the dark, which also has a body like a cloud’s, leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. .       .       . Here’s a sky no higher than a streetlamp, and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire. It’s 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle, minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow; and here’s our sleep-sodden paperboy with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog, his unclouding face set for paper route like an alarm clock. Here’s a memory in the making, for this could be the morning he doesn’t come home and his parents two hours later drive his route until they find him asleep, propped against a streetlamp, his papers all delivered and his dirty paper- satchel slack, like an emptied lung, and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue through which a last few dandruff-flecks of snow meander casually down. The dog squeaks in out of the dark, snuffling me too me too. And here he goes home to memory, and to hot chocolate on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice, and to the long and ordinary day, school, two triumphs and one severe humiliation on the playground, the past already growing its scabs, the busride home, dinner, and evening leading to sleep like the slide that will spill him out, come June, into the eye-reddening chlorine waters of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed. Kiss. Kiss. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark. Here the dog lies down by his bed, and sighs and farts. Will he always be this skinny, chicken-bones? He’ll remember like a prayer how his mother made breakfast for him every morning before he trudged out to snip the papers free. Just as his mother will remember she felt guilty never to wake up with him to give him breakfast. It was Cream of Wheat they always or never had together. It turns out you are the story of your childhood and you’re under constant revision, like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong, shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk. And each of these selves had a childhood it traded for love and grudged to give away, now lost irretrievably, in storage like a set of dishes from which no food, no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard sauce, nor even a single raspberry, can be eaten until the afterlife, which is only childhood in its last disguise, all radiance or all humiliation, and so it is forfeit a final time. In fact it was awful, you think, or why should the piecework of grief be endless? Only because death is, and likewise loss, which is not awful, but only breathtaking. There’s no truth about your childhood, though there’s a story, yours to tend, like a fire or garden. Make it a good one, since you’ll have to live it out, and all its revisions, so long as you all shall live, for they shall be gathered to your deathbed, and they’ll have known to what you and they would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you. The map in the shopping center has an X signed “you are here.” A dream is like that. In a dream you are never eighty, though you may risk death by other means: you’re on a ledge and memory calls you to jump, but a deft cop talks you in to a small, bright room, and snickers. And in a dream, you’re everyone somewhat, but not wholly. I think I know how that works: for twenty-one years I had a father and then I became a father, replacing him but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers. Surely, that’s what middle-aged means, being father and son to sons and father. That a male has only one mother is another story, told wherever men weep wholly. Though nobody’s replaced. In one dream I’m leading a rope of children to safety, through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out and I have to throw snowballs well to him so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know he’s my father, at ease in his catcher’s squat, and that the dream has revived to us both an old unspoken fantasy: we’re a battery. I’m young, I’m brash, I don’t know how to pitch but I can throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he can handle pitchers and control a game. I look to him for a sign. I’d nod for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip without seams, and I don’t rely only on my live, young arm, but throw by all the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs toward him no faster than the snow in the dream drifts down. Nothing takes forever, but I know what the phrase means. The children grow more cold and hungry and cruel to each other the longer the ball’s in the air, and it begins to melt. By the time it gets to him we’ll be our waking ages, and each of us is himself alone, and we all join hands and go. .       .       . Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey and that green you see just under the surface of water, a shimmer more than a color. Time to dive back into sleep, as if into happiness, that neglected discipline .... In those sixth-grade book reports you had to say if the book was optimistic or not, and everyone looked at you the same way: how would he turn out? He rolls in his sleep like an otter. Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it’s funny, and on the way to work he pries the cap off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn’t cool one weary thing for long; it’s gonna be a cooker. The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat on his upper lip, as if waking itself, becoming explicit, were hard work. Who knows if he’s happy or not? A child is all the tools a child has, growing up, who makes what he can.

And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place . . . T. S. Eliot The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond and drove little waves toward us, brisk, purposeful waves that vanished at our feet, such energy thwarted by so little elevation. The wind was endless, seamless, old as the earth. Insects came to regard us with favor. I felt them alight, felt their minute footfalls. I was a challenge, an Everest . . . And you, whom I have heard breathe all night, sigh through the water of sleep with vestigial gills . . . A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent, while higher up two bullet-shaped jets dragged their roars behind them on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little. Perhaps it was necessary. All our years together— and not just together. Surely by now we have the same blood type, the same myopia. Sometimes I think we’re the same sex, the one in the middle of man and woman, born of both as every child is. The waves came to us, one each heartbeat, and lay themselves at our feet. The swelling goes down. The fever cools. There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago bear and beaver, fox and partridge den and nest and hunt and are hunted. I wish I had the means to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild. But then where would we live? I wanted that hour with you all winter— I thought of it while I worked, before I slept and when I woke, a time when the tangled would straighten, when contrition would become benediction: the positive hour, shining like mica. At last the wind brought it to us across the pond, then took it up again, every last minute.

He lived—childhood summers thru bare feet then years of money’s lack and heat beside the river—out of flood came his wood, dog, woman, lost her, daughter— prologue to planting trees. He buried carp beneath the rose where grass-still the marsh rail goes. To bankers on high land he opened his wine tank. He wished his only daughter to work in the bank but he’d given her a source to sustain her— a weedy speech, a marshy retainer.

I’m four at the hospital I was born in. From behind the nurse’s white gown and mask: I want you to count backward from ten for me now out loud. * My stepmother with a stack of my father’s papers. What do I do with it, Jimmie? * It was a beautiful suit of clothes, very expensive. I saw it hanging from the mirror on the far side of his car. He was so pleased when he found my note on the windshield. He took the suit upstairs and came back down to let me see it on him. * When they want rain, they put their mouths to the water and blow. They take some in their hands and as they throw it upward cry Look here! Do like this! * A note to her television set was left by a woman who then took her own life. * We were replaced on the line by the Unimates. They’re good at the work. They’re never late. The one problem with them is that they don’t buy cars. * It defies me. I put it right here where I always do, and it’s not there. I loathe a beastly key. * If you work hard to keep a secret, you’re resentful when it’s not found out. * Through our closed eyelids as the bomb exploded, we could see every bone in our hands. * It has a Slavic name he couldn’t pronounce. I said It’s flanged and chrome, with seven spiders on each side. That’s it, he said. Where can he but it, he needs it today. I told him I don’t know, but I’ve got one in my garage. * She can’t leave you alone. Sits you down, feeds you what you don’t need to eat. It’s no use telling Bertie Mae no. And of course we wouldn’t take nothing for her. * I’ve killed other people. You’ll find that this will go better if you and I don’t talk. * Foreplay starts at breakfast. * On the answering machine: If you could call me tonight no matter how late, it would be a good idea.

A boy I did not marry                  taught me to dance salsa on 2      placed the fingers of his left hand            on my untutored spine;               you know what it’s like to become someone’s clave to love for the span           of the trombone’s long breath                  he      whispered negra so I spun                my heart landing            on     the     rum-covered     linoleum of a nightclub on what used to be New York Ave              in what used to be Chocolate City I let him turn & spin                                 my name bella negra his hands were less tender but still I let them roam when I 1, 2, 35, 6, 7 in front of my mirror I was always la negra defended in the lyric                       and     you     can     forgive searching hands when a mouth swells the biggest ache of your body into song

Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign, a hill with cows and a white house on top, a mall and grocery store where people shop, a diner where some people go to dine. It is the same no matter where you go, and downtown you will find no big surprises. Each fall the dew point falls until it rises. White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow. This is all right. This is their hope. And yet, though what you see is never what you get, it does feel somehow changed from what it was. Is it the people? Houses? Fields? The weather? Is it the streets? Is it these things together? Nothing here ever changes, till it does.

What will I miss when I'm gone? The squeak of the wheelbarrow's wheel, Grace note that strikes with every slow Revolution, and then the hushed, rusty Answer in triplets from the invisible Bird in the lackluster maples. Branches, weeds, last autumn's leavings Raked from the moss-eaten pads, beds, Borders, still untrimmed hedges. Also the silent pale blue bells Of my half dozen borage, ringed, Self-seeded from the woods. Daylilies my mother liked to set Roadside in June. Pale Greek anemones She never traveled far enough To find wild, as I did once or twice, but Maybe I'll bring her some, if over there Windflowers blow beside a cloudy sea.

It’s alot like a cave full of pictures & black & white checked flags you may overdose on caffeine it’s the closest restaurant to our house maybe five miles, it’s very cheap you can go there when you have almost no money they let you use the telephone i can get steak tartare there for $2.25 but i’ve never called it that just raw hamburger with an egg yolk, pickle relish & garlic powder plus the celtic salt i bring along the owner, h (after whom the h-burger is named) is loquacious, surprising, has a santa claus belly & wears suspenders there’s ashtrays everywhere & a great old pinball machine it’s like east nassau but it’s in west lebanon i think you can always talk about the weather & hunting the clientele is open-minded as are the waitress & waiter who kneels when he takes your order during hunting season it opens at 4:30 a.m. it’s for sale but that’s not quite serious h’s wife thinks he spends too much time there (which he does) so she started calling him by their dog’s name, peaches h is a big fan of northern exposure, oh & i forgot to mention the biscuits & sausage gravy which are genuine, greyish & great. recently h got a smoker & this year we’ll go to the new year’s eve party & eat stuffed shrimp and/or lobster

My sister woke me very early that morning and told me “Get up, you have to come see this the ocean’s filled with stars” Delighted by the revelation I dressed quickly and thought If the ocean’s filled with stars I must take the first flight and collect all of the fish from the sky

Surely you paused at this roadside oasis In your nomadic youth, and saw the mound Of never-used cement, the curious faces, The soft-drink ads and the uneven ground Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail. Like a frontier store-front in an old western It might have nothing behind it but thin air, Building materials, fruit boxes, scrap iron, Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden Silence of an untended kitchen garden — Nirvana! But the cracked panes reveal a dark Interior echoing with the cries of children. Here in this quiet corner of Co. Cork A family ate, slept, and watched the rain Dance clean and cobalt the exhausted grit So that the mind shrank from the glare of it. Where did they go? South Boston? Cricklewood? Somebody somewhere thinks of this as home, Remembering the old pumps where they stood, Antique now, squirting juice into a cream Lagonda or a dung-caked tractor while A cloud swam on a cloud-reflecting tile. Surely a whitewashed sun-trap at the back Gave way to hens, wild thyme, and the first few Shadowy yards of an overgrown cart track, Tyres in the branches such as Noah knew — Beyond, a swoop of mountain where you heard, Disconsolate in the haze, a single blackbird. Left to itself, the functional will cast A death-bed glow of picturesque abandon. The intact antiquities of the recent past, Dropped from the retail catalogues, return To the materials that gave rise to them And shine with a late sacramental gleam. A god who spent the night here once rewarded Natural courtesy with eternal life — Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared For ever there, an old man and his wife. The virgin who escaped his dark design Sanctions the townland from her prickly shrine. We might be anywhere but are in one place only, One of the milestones of earth-residence Unique in each particular, the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense — Not in the hope of a resplendent future But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature.