I’m Tired of Writing About My Childhood
But I was born underground—or
I ate the seeds, and I can never leave,
not really. Which is to say I’ve seen your
moon, your sun even, how they hang like lit
fruit from a soft canopy of sky. The wind
that rounds the surface of this rock ruffles
my hair the way breath always does, only
yours is blossom scented, star jasmine, sweet
perfume. You smelled the dirt on me,
didn’t you? Back at home, everything’s
inverted—firmament of packed earth
and the only blooms are roots. You wonder
if we’ve gotten good at seeing in the dark,
consolation of adaptation? We’re not like
lantern fish or frogs—ordinary bodies
ours, ordinary needs—but sometimes
we make out the shape of what’s coming,
hold very still until the footsteps turn,
stop the rain of soil upon our heads.
Maybe I’m the poet of this place because
I like the word gloaming as much as glimmer,
how it holds both glow and loam, makes
of time a pageant, makes loss of light
another kind of light. I would write
a sonnet for daybreak, first beam by which
you watch your lovers leave—I like reprieve
as much as the next man, am tempted by
the hand that reaches down, how sure its
fingers, its grip to me how dear—but
we’re given our stories, same as our names.
I come how I’m called, and I come from here.
I Want to Go to Them and Say Stop
after Sharon Olds
Oh god, thank god for the things I’ll never
understand—what made my mother take
my father’s hand across the decades
that separated them, across the carcass
of his marriage and the bar behind which
she worked, the one he sidled up to night
after night until whatever kept their bodies
apart—polite distance, obligation, fear—
dissolved. Then I began. He disappeared,
reappeared in his actual life, in the bed,
across the table from his wife. In theory,
a thing he’d planted grew. In theory, a child
like the ones he bathed and dressed and rocked
and soothed shot up under her mother’s gaze
alone, and god, I’ve had my own child now,
I’ll never understand how a man loves
only what happenstance keeps in his
eyeline, in his arms. Thank you, god, for
making me too stupid to make sense of
such a thing. When we met he said I looked
like her—that much makes sense—me the age
she was when he fucked her: eighteen. Watch me
watch him pull the plungers on a pinball game
in the bowling alley’s back alley, move in
close enough to smell his aftershave. Catch him
caught off guard, watch his hands go still
but his eyes stay trained on the playfield,
bumpers and slingshots, bells and buzzers
stilled, and in that quiet my small voice:
I think you know my mother. I said it,
but I didn’t believe it. Even now I can’t
put them in the same room, never mind
a bed, a backseat, never mind this stranger
knowing anything about the body that grew me,
knew me first. Who’s your mother? God,
the question made me want to fight, or fall down,
there’s a universe in which I fell down, melted
through the floor, lived a whole stunned life
in the crawlspace underneath that room,
and here’s my knees weak in this world, too.
I said her name. It’s what I knew. Oh, god,
oh Sharon, I want to live but can’t press
that man against my mother for the spark
that starts me. She’s instant rice with butter
or a bowl of cereal at night. She’s cold hair
rubbed between my fingers to fall asleep
and the boot prints into which I put
my own small feet until we reached
some snow hill’s peak and the speed
with which our bodies slid on plastic bags
and the silence in which we sometimes
sat a long time at the bottom, watching
the clouds our breathing made.
She’s a hand towel warmed on the toaster
over and over and held to the throb
of my ear. She’s waiting for me
at the bus stop. She fucks up. She’s here.
What I Wanted to Keep Private
I wanted you last night when I woke, my body
vibrating like train-shook ground, and might have
let out the train’s slow scream, the kind that quickens
as the beast draws near, but I wanted to keep
private that desire and that fear. Once I transgressed
but I’m not a permanent monster is a thing a friend said
to comfort me for some sin of my own, but in the dark
that phrase travels me like a pulse, shocking each
cloistered organ in turn. When I was fifteen, I took
a gold necklace from my grandmother’s dresser
and gave it to a sweetheart, bit of shimmer that graced
my favorite neck until it slipped off, sunk in the silt
of a summer lake, lost, and I lost the sweetheart, too,
but I carried the lead-weight shame of that theft, secret,
until now. I don’t feel any lighter. I don’t know what
I might yet steal, though I remember everything
stolen from me, like the kitten loosed from our house
in the morning and by afternoon purring in the arms
of a neighbor kid who swaggered up the driveway,
invited me to stroke his new cat. It’s not so hard
to forgive that boy. Who doesn’t sometimes want to hold
a soft thing not his own? Who doesn’t hope to know
the sugar name that calls the handsome stranger
home? Anyway, I’m not alone. Once I was the kind
of monster who takes the gold from one beloved throat
to trim another. And once I was the kind who hid
the hunger that drove my hand, as though only a said thing’s
made true. Now? I just want to be said. I love you.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Melissa Crowe
