12 Teen poems

You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly makes you laugh like mules. Chances dance off your wrists, each day ready, sprites in your bones and spite not yet swollen, not yet set. You gather handful after miracle handful, seeing straight, reaching the lighthouse in record time, pockets brim with scimitar things. Now is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm. Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick twins, carried on your backs, each vow new to touch and each mistake a broken biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines without levers, easy in bowel and lung. One cartwheel over the quicksand curve of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

Our high school principal wagged his finger over two manila folders lying on his desk, labeled with our names— my boyfriend and me— called to his office for skipping school. The day before, we ditched Latin and world history to chase shadows of clouds on a motorcycle. We roared down rolling asphalt roads through the Missouri River bottoms beyond town, our heads emptied of review tests and future plans. We stopped on a dirt lane to hear a meadowlark’s liquid song, smell heart-break blossom of wild plum. Beyond leaning fence posts and barbwire, a tractor drew straight lines across the field unfurling its cape of blackbirds. Now forty years after that geography lesson in spring, I remember the principal’s words. How right he was in saying: This will be part of your permanent record.

All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else mattered but to learn some new trick, to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flew off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted into a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum and how they smelled so different from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack, jumped in when some one of us got jumped, so when a man we had never seen before came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man like someone walking into a bank and stabbed him. The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, right in the middle of his new consciousness, kind of looking around.

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years. Outside the vineyards vanished under rain, And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang Their lost songs:Amapola; La Paloma; Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess, Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own. Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish. I hated high school then, & on weekends drove A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone. Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing, And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then. I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings, The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind Of solitude the world usually allows Only to kings & criminals who are extinct, Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin Each autumn, & made that little hell of days— The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs. The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared. And the girls I tried to talk to after class Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed, With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment. Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road. A life like that? It seemed to go on forever— Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend. And then the first ice hung like spider lattices Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One, And then the first dark entering the trees— And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner, The way they always seemed afraid of something, And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

Where we could be boys together. This region of want: the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat. Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither. Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust. And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles; upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll me in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren could come back into his fold, and I would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground. Clouds, above, lenticular, the spreading fundament, a glorious breech among the thunderheads and in their midst, a great white heron magnifies the day. We’d keep together, he and I, and we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue each other through the crush of darkling rifts. Climb into each other’s precipitous coombes. Where would it end, this brush and bush, this brome and blazing star? There is always some new way to flex a limb and find its secret drupe. Not only the hope of nature; the nature of hope: so long as culverts carry us, so long as we stay ripe to one another’s lips, and welcoming to hands, as long as we extend our spans, to tangle them, as spinning insects do their glistered floss. This is not a time to think the trumpet vine is sullen. Rather: the trumpet’s bell is but a prelude. It says we all are beautiful at least once. And, if you’d watch over me, we can be beautiful again.

To be shy, to lower your eyes after making a greeting. to know wherever you go you’ll be called on, to fear whoever you’re near will ask you, to wear the softer sides of the air in rooms filled with angers, your ship always docked in transparent slips whose wharves are sheerer than membranes.

The trouble was not about finding acceptance. Acceptance was available in the depths of the mind And among like people. The trouble was the look into the canyon Which had come a long time earlier And spent many years being forgotten. The fine garments and rows of strong shoes, The pantry stocked with good grains and butter— Everything could be earned by producing right answers. Answers were important, the canyon said, But the answers were not the solution. A glimpse into the future had shown the prairie On which houses stood sturdily. The earth was moist and generous, the sunlight benevolent. The homesteaders dreamed up palaces and descendants, And the animals slept soundly as stones. It was a hard-earned heaven, the self-making Of travelers, and often, out on the plains, Mirages rose of waterfalls, moose, and rows of fresh-plowed soil, But nobody stopped to drink the false water. Real water being plentiful, they were not thirsty. A few made their fortunes from native beauty, Others from native strength, but most from knowledge, As uncertainties in science could be written off to faith. Faith was religious and ordinary life physical, And spiritual was a song that had not yet arrived.

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. “Can you feel it yet?” they whisper. I don’t know what to say, again. They chuckle, Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. “Well, maybe next time.” And they rise, Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

She got into her first choice and i'm happy for her genuinely and also something else that i don't want to name but is definitely there

My son at fifteen is a closed door a shrug, a fine i remember being fifteen i was also a closed door he'll open when he's ready i'm trying to be patient and present at the same time