I.
UTILITARIANISM
Salisbury
morning stippled with flowers--
azaleas flaring
by the door, rhododendrons
sporting their
red boutonieres, magnolias
like huge pink
artichokes. And birdsong--
lisping warblers
in the linwoods, the flicker’s
ratcheting call,
mockingbird on the chimney
auctioning the
moment. I tried to steer her,
just three years
old, past the robin.
Expert at
noticing, she walked straight to it.
“What happened
to his head,” she asked.
“Hit by a car,”
I said. She looked and looked,
put hands on her
knees as she leaned in
to study the
grizzled ruff of feathers, ants
climbing the
bent beak, diving into the eye sockets.
Finally, she
straightened up. “Oh, well,” she said
--around us
birdsong brilliant and the blossoming world--
”all the others
birds have their heads.”
II. THE FISH
For a long time, nobody mentioned
the pale blue fish, the transparent
and somnolent fish that drifted,
dreamlike,
among the high-rises. Nobody
mentioned how
they drifted with children
in their bellies, or how the children
pressed
their hands
against the insides of the cloud-like
stomachs. Or
how the looks
on the children’s faces were querulous;
not
frightened as
the adults had hoped. Not
stoical. Nor
grieving. Hundreds of feet
up and the children stretched as if
waking
in their beds.
Happy, happy in the lee of their
dreams.
Happy, with their warm feet
and the blue of the sky
everywhere.
Below, on the streets, in the alarmed
houses, the adults began shouting
and pointing.
Already, in earnest,
the
rescue had begun.
III. HORSE IN SHADOW
Cold, the wind that riffs
through the west end door
sounding its low moan,
grieving the moment’s passing.
And cold the nose of the
near-black gelding
where he stomps once in the
glistening darkness,
the gentled night. My twelve year old daughter,
stiff in her jodhpurs and
boots, removes one glove
and reaches a carrot toward
the shadowed head.
“Good boy,” she purrs. “Good boy.”
Good boy,
who’d bucked and lurched, galloping
hellbent
at the corrugated wall,
whirling until he’d launched her
from the saddle into the
dust-dazzled air.
“Good boy,” she says. And he is--furious
teacher,
unendurable bliss--because
she says he is, loyal girl,
good friend, forgiver,
profferer of carrots, wielder
of whips, tiny commander in
her wafer-thin saddle.
IV.
ADOLESCENCE
For
the lucky, it’s years spent
spinning the frantic wheel
of a carnival bumper car,
lights swirling, the buzzing
and rumbling, sparking
and zapping, intent only
on causing the surprising
crash, the ram and
counter-ram,
spun wheel, sudden surge
in reverse, the steady stare-down,
head-jerk, one car after
another until you find
yourself
targeting the bare legs
of the college kid, his back
turned to unstick a clot
of stuck cars, bearing down,
full speed now, the humming
in your head now, until
the power dies and you stop
dead at his sneakered feet
and smile primly up--
