Four Poems from Childhood

“Hostess”

Ten years old

I started throwing parties

for the neighborhood kids.

Two weeks before,

my bottom dresser drawer

emptied out for party things.

A tablecloth, cut-up colored paper for confetti, old toys

for prizes and favors. Hand-drawn cards for games.

Candy squirreled away from the church event -

not by me only,

but my brother and the neighbor boy, too.

Ten dollars from my Grandma, who always

sends us ten dollars exactly on our birthdays;

the final judicious trip

to Wal-Mart. Each cent counted

for cheap soda, balloons,

Skittles, Little Debbie.

“Mystical Myst”

I remembered today

that I used to have a story

called Mystical Myst, and I

was a slave girl named Mearta.

In all my drawings she

had short dark hair, could handle

a sword. I think maybe

I still try to look like her

without knowing it.

“Ticks”

I wasn’t rebellious

as a child. That is,

I didn’t run away

(properly) or smoke

or throw fits. I got along

with my parents

for the most part, listened

except when Mom read

a book of instruction

for girls (then I hid

my head under the couch

and plugged my ears).

The one rule

I remember really

hating, really yanking

to disobey was

don’t wear skirts

in tall grass.

“H.A.S.O.P.”

I was eleven.

It was time

for a H.A.S.O.P. –

a Heart And Soul

On Paper. Diary

to the nth degree.

So secret I didn’t even

want the boys to steal

and hold ransom my black

notebook filled with writing

so small even I

could barely

read it. 

Unjust, Gentle, Mild

There's something wrong in this. Who made me
so easy to need you, so
needy to please you,
so hard to give you what
you deserve you
giver-of-all-small-pleasures

you
carrot soup familiar
find my keys with a headlamp
see my friends surprise
rompus-bompus fly or fall
and trembling at these
people all here, and I'm old now,
but I remember

the way she pauses
in talking, how he studies dreams
together across from me
our eggs, toast, and fried potatoes
smiling early morning smiles and
reunion of how changed and
the light

that you made
me is a wonder. Who
needed another half-drafted worker
laughing at another day done and not
much in it but you, and my weak lungs
running barefoot farther than ever
because you say you love me
and I don't
deserve it.

The River, Stolen Word Poem from Carolyn Forche's "Travel Papers"

We halted where

the river, thick with freshwater whitefish, vendace,

bulged under arching birchwood

limbs before stretching out again, fated for the sea.

We built a fire

from half-soft wood where ants once lived –

ate silently, then

hung our tarp between two sturdy oaks. Outside

was only another roof. We, ourselves –

Not so much within

as under, dreaming,

the earth beneath snow when spring begins,

articulation of the body visible.

The trail we left behind

was kissed with yellow gorse

and pea-green fronds.

We found a naked patch, burnt

by a still pond, scarred with ash, pearled with feral swans.

And now, weary, birch-lined,

we set up camp by the river you say reminds you of Dresden,

the Elbe river armored

in green, infested with boats in afternoon

heavy with their passing

loads of freight

bound for Prague or Torgau, (or Budapest

for that matter, since all you saw was disappearing

hulls behind the hunched backs of fields).

-

When we met, in America,

we recognized each other

for that hungry look of refugees in another world.

You had become, as everything uprooted becomes,

a knitted collection of skeletons.

We ducked under the storefront awning, soaked;

when you saw my face you pushed our way through to the stove.

I remember your eyes were black as basalt

not cooled, shot

with blood like particles

still glowing. You were one

day from drowning, then.

One day from taking

the chance that there was something other

than this bog.

We wondered, afterward, if our darkness was imaginary;

if even the missing names in the registry

were some foolish joke, or ghost

of a story someone wrote in prison

and scrawled on a stray sheet of paper.

Because, why else the lilies?

How else could men carve the frieze?

We had to believe this was hand-blown,

not something God let drop

to crack with a snap of twigs

or breaking glass.

After winter, we thought those things. Such

damp and heavy coats we peeled

from us!

I heard the change in your voice

as told me you saw a morning glory bloom

and fill with bees

one after the other that morning. Your

wonder at the unknown,

the bare child of you,

decided there was something to be lived.

We signed papers by July, and you

said you were (and you still are),

sad I could never meet your mother.

You felt the calluses on my hand,

and I knew without words.

But now we stretch out under moonlight.

Hoping against rain, and not –

Hoping rather that our walls of one window

will open into something wider still. A dream

I had on our first night back –

you told me I was right – said rain was coming.

We wind

our way to Poland, Gdynia instead

of Krakow.

It seemed

as if twilight

was thick with clouds

of swifts.

We held

a ceremony for meteors under

the sky in August. Perseids

ripe, and dripping of time.

Why don’t we take the road?

You pointed to the river: there –

you said, was the road –