It was 1945, and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,
and my father came home from work that evening
tired and washed his hands
not picturing the black-goggled men
with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening.
Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline
with her palm as he stretched out
on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed. My father sold used cars
at the time, and didn’t like it,
so if he complained maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms,
the heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening,
arm in arm, without saying anything.
Browsing category: Relationship
The Hundred Names of Love
The children have gone to bed.
We are so tired we could fold ourselves neatly
behind our eyes and sleep mid-word, sleep standing
warm among the creatures in the barn, lean together
and sleep, forgetting each other completely in the velvet,
the forgiveness of that sleep.
Then the one small cry:
one strike of the match-head of sound:
one child’s voice:
and the hundred names of love are lit
as we rise and walk down the hall.
One hundred nights we wake like this,
wake out of our nowhere
to kneel by small beds in darkness.
One hundred flowers open in our hands,
a name for love written in each one.
For a Five-Year-Old
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another,
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.
Astronomer
A child climbs into a cardboard house,
shuts its doors and windows
to hold in the dark, and lies on her back
inside, looking up through its cut-out moon
and stars. She knows she is not looking
at the sky. But she calls out, still,
It's nighttime! I'm looking at the sky!
Sight
Go north a dozen years
on a road overgrown with vines
to find the days after you were born.
Flowers remembered their colors and trees
were frothy and the hospital was
behind us now, its brick indifference
forgotten by our car mirrors. You were
revealed to me: tiny, delicate,
your head smelling of some other world.
Turn right after the circular room
where I kept my books and right again
past the crib where you did not sleep
and you will find the window where
I held you that June morning
when you opened your eyes. They were
blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate
they would later become. You were gazing
into the world: at our walls,
my red cup, my sleepless hair and though
I'm told you could not focus, and you
no longer remember, we were seeing
one another after seasons of darkness.
The Game
And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I'd carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we'd build a town in the basement
from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until
one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.
Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us — it was usually
a boy — became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.
Nine o'clock and all is well, he'd say,
walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.
Ten o'clock and all is well
. And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted . . .
Eleven o'clock and all is well.
Twelve o'clock. One o'clock. Two o'clock . . .
and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.
Last Day of Kindergarten
In the photograph
the boy is ecstatic,
set free, a young king,
everything ahead of him.
There is nothing he can’t have
if he wants it and he wants it,
as does his friend beside him.
They are ready now to ride off
together and slay dragons,
rescue the world. It’s all here
in the park after the last bell;
it’s here in the green summer
they have been released to.
It’s here in their manhood.
They’ve only finished kindergarten
but they understand freedom
and friendship. They’re on top
of the picnic table, they’re on top
of the world in their tennis shoes,
they have raised their arms,
they are such men as could
raise continents; they have
survived. Look how their
fingers reach the sky
and their legs are sure as
horses. Their bodies
will forever do anything they ask.
First Hour
That hour. I was most myself. I had shrugged
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of the room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
out and back, on gravity’s silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on my
self her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and tongue,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth,
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk, yet—no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me,
and took me to my mother.
Fifteen
South of the bridge on Seventeenth
I found back of the willows one summer
day a motorcycle with engine running
as it lay on its side, ticking over
slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.
I admired all that pulsing gleam, the
shiny flanks, the demure headlights
fringed where it lay; I led it gently
to the road and stood with that
companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.
We could find the end of a road, meet
the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about
hills, and patting the handle got back a
confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged
a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.
Thinking, back farther in the grass I found
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped
over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale—
I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand
over it, called me good man, roared away.
I stood there, fifteen.
Elena at Five Years
Elena warms a brown egg
between her palms, close to her lips,
cold from a carton,
chosen from the dozen.
It is the center now of a sphere
of kitchen towels in a drawer
next to an Amish cookbook,
next to the oven’s white side.
For three weeks at 3:15
Elena will breathe on that egg
held between her lifelines
against her grape-stained lips,
she anticipates the birth
although brown eggs, her mother says,
can’t hatch.
But at 5, Elena
has a good ear for heartbeats.
Sidewalk cracks cry
when her tennis shoe touches them,
the lava chips that embroider
the yard have names,
and a brown egg is throbbing
in the cup of her hand.
Eggs
Mothershape, how we love you!
In a dream we almost remember
the floating cushions, the waterbed,
in nightmares, we hack our way
out of the calcium walls
which refused to expand with us.
When we eat eggs, we return.
It’s a matter of beginnings.
Heart attacks are forgotten
when the delicious, dangerous yellow
is rich and smooth as paint in the can
and the tasteless, foam-rubber white
transformed by a pinch of salt,
when we sit down for picnic lunches
and peel our way back inside
the shell falling under our fingers
to reveal the gleaming rim,
the oval promise through which we come
to the holy of holies,
the green-tinged, golden, solid sphere,
a child’s first model of the moon.
Across the Bay
If we throw our eyes way out to sea,
they thank us. All those corners
we’ve made them sit down in lately,
those objects with dust along
their seams.
Out here eyes find the edge
that isn’t one.
Gray water, streak of pink, little tap of sun,
and that storm off to the right
that seems to like us now.
How far can the wind carry
whatever lets go? Light
shining from dead starts
cradles our sleep. Secret light
no one reads by—
who owns that beam?
Who follows it far enough?
The month our son turned five
we drove between cotton fields
down to the bay. Thick layers
of cloud pouring into one another
as tractors furrowed the earth,
streams of gulls dipping down
behind. We talked about
the worms in their beaks.
How each thing on earth
searches out what it needs,
if it’s lucky. And always
another question—what if?
what if?
Someday you’ll go so far away
I’ll die for missing you,
like millions of mothers
before me—how many friends
I suddenly have! Across the bay
a ship will be passing, tiny dot
between two ports meaning nothing
to me, carrying cargo useless to my life,
but I’ll place my eyes on it
as if it held me up. Or you rode
that boat.