209 Nostalgia poems

I used to live on the chalk where clay gives way to the Roman road en route to an Iron Age fort Laid a bivvy bag off the track    squinting into the night bling for meteors and space junk   Hiked for days dodging sarn and tor Woke to dew on blade of plantain shoved aside by the nose of a blind mole Once I flew a homemade kite with the boy who had the wrong smell He tried to kiss me on Gallows Barrow So how could I leave my homeland webbed by common path and famine row where blackberries dared to bleed over my teeth When I’d loved nothing more than swinging over worn stiles chasing primrose trails wiping sap of bluebell from my sleeve On the road my legs seem less reckless now more tools of philosophy And what of this is true? The boy, the kite, the blood of berry, how I can tell a simple lie that weaves the yarn of my country back into my story The bit about philosophy

I wore Grandma Liz's pearls for play, a plastic strand long enough to pool on the carpet over my stubbed toes. When I pull them over my head now, I smell phantoms: cigarettes, Esteé Lauder. I don't smoke or spritz on perfume. I don't layer polyester or perm my hair. I've slipped off my wedding ring as she did, signed divorce. What advice would she offer for life between husbands?Wear red lipstick and always leave it behind.

From the weathered boards knots pop like the eyes of potatoes. From brick salients not a clink of a pupil in a loop- hole. Cannon, yes, but without their kick. Ironically or entirely appropriately, who can say, the Fort will not admit us. The reenactors are going home; we see them retreat, backs x’d with sus- penders, toward the forest housecleaned into state park. Ocean beyond the ramparts suggests that stem-celled seconds fiend- ishly agglomerate with fits and starts into unprecedented forms. And so who cares that a fort’s built on a sand bar, that we don’t make it in, and go only so far round the perimeter.

are all that’s left of Gray’s Papaya on 8th St.

swans The arc of the driveway is what’s left, where someone built a house and tended a lake to walk beside, discussing politics and how a tree moves in the wind. Its music is a jetty drifting away from the boathouse whose rolled-shut metal door tricks visitors into thinking it holds a life raft. The house drifts beyond its purpose, is demolished for a car park and picnics and returns in a special room, small, sturdy, becoming anonymous as its windows empty, enormous insects swanning around — they own the place — occasionally stunning themselves on the glass. secretarial The country, sometimes, still appears to ask to just be taken down, even by a tourist, on no one’s side, a tourist lost at home, blue book open, ticking off each task. But when old Colin, in pajamas, explained how I could evade the barbed and electric wire that fenced off fields and the bull let loose to scare the stranger off (I’d stopped to ask for directions), I was ready to wade through cowshit and knee-high grass to see if the poet, long abroad, was written in the ruin’s native life. Colin stopped me then, leaning on the open door of the Renault— noting first the English registration I’d parked outside his roadside bungalow, and said his father hated that his mother called him Colin, but he’s the one who stuck it out. No one, it seems he had to tell me this, no one belonging to them ever had to go over to England, a sally he follows up with a question about where I live, before naming the man on whose land the castle rested: we do nothing, he says, but damage what we inherited, bulldozing the medieval church and causing the collapse of the foxhole the settler and his family used, legend has it, to make, under a smoldering fire, their escape. This new heir has his eye on the castle, no doubt. It will soon be more literature than history. We are not all the same, he said. I recall, at the edge of the clearing, the grant’s nice clause saying the poet had a right to possess new areas discovered by his survey ... To belong, a moment’s authority is nothing.

You are smaller than I remember And so is the house, set downhill Afloat in a sea of scrub oak. From up here It’s an ordinary box with gravel Spread over its lid, weighting it, but Inside it’s full of shadows and sky. Clouds pull themselves over dry Grass, which, if  I’m not mistaken, will erupt Any minute in flame. Only A spark, a sunbeam focused. From up Here, enjoying the view, I can finally Take you in. Will you wave back? I keep Slingshotting around. There’s gravity For you, but all I ever wanted was to fly.

The fair rolled into town surprisingly intact, like a plate unbreakable because it has been dropped and glued so many times that it is all glue and no plate. The fair was no fair. But, oh, it was a thrill! The fair slid into town just as a clown slides into pants. The fit was loose but right. The sheriff  had a job directing traffic. The barber was the sheriff  for a night, and people paid to see a human ape. They frowned to find her happy and alive. The fair spilled into town like a box of tacks. Later that month, in with the rest at church, were people no one knew, though none could tell exactly who was who.

Gainesville, Florida An empire of moss, dead yellow, and carapace: that was the season of gnats, amyl nitrate, and goddamn rain; of the gator in the fake lake rolling his silverish eyes; of vice; of Erotica, give it up and let

I like old photographs of relatives in black and white, their faces set like stone. They knew this was serious business. My favorite album is the one that's filled with people none of us can even name. I find the recent ones more difficult. I wonder, now, if anyone remembers how fiercely I refused even to stand beside him for this picture — how I shrank back from his hand and found the other side. Forever now, for future family, we will be framed like this, although no one will wonder at the way we are arranged. No one will ever wonder, since we'll be forever smiling there — our mouths all teeth.

for Richard Before the days of self service, when you never had to pump your own gas, I was the one who did it for you, the girl who stepped out at the sound of a bell with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back in a straight, unlovely ponytail. This was before automatic shut-offs and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank, I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas backed up, came arcing out of the hole in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts, belly and legs. And I had to hurry back to the booth, the small employee bathroom with the broken lock, to change my uniform, peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin and wash myself in the sink. Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt pure and amazed — the way the amber gas glazed my flesh, the searing, subterranean pain of it, how my skin shimmered and ached, glowed like rainbowed oil on the pavement. I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall, for the first time, in love, that man waiting patiently in my future like a red leaf on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty that asks to be noticed. How was I to know it would begin this way: every cell of my body burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me a nimbus of light that would carry me through the days, how when he found me, weeks later, he would find me like that, an ordinary woman who could rise in flame, all he would have to do is come close and touch me.