Upon Receiving an Oil Canvas, December 2010

Had Dorothea Lange visited Claremont, Illinois in 1943,

She could have photographed my grandfather, Estes,

Feeding cows from slop bucket

While white chickens watched, waiting for kernels of corn.

Old, black cow stands 15 hands at hip;

Bloated teets sag tiredly from sharp, gaunt pelvis;

As white calf suckles, mother feeds from 

Pail of farmer.

There is a thumbprint.

There is an underexposure of adhesive backing.

There is movement of a satisfied steer

Meandering off frame right.

There is a split-rail fence.

There is a straw hat.

There is a wedding ring on the left hand of my grandfather,

Who died in 1997.

I hold this photograph in memory of time not so long ago, 

But before my own memory:

There was time before you, it says, and there is time after.

And there were many years more inside mind of man.

Not so many, for poultry, now dead,
Fine Sunday dinner, crisp fried in glossy bottom 

Of iron skillet.

Nor many, for beeves, butchered now, swallowed now,

Ground into hamburger, or cooked long in gravies,

Well done.

Yet they were, once--with grasses that are now gone,

Fence rows, now gone,

Man in bib overalls, too,

Now Gone.

Where, now, is Florence Owens Thompson?

Where, now, is Estes Mervin Atkins?

Where, now, is Dorothea Margaretta Lange?

Where, now, is the person who left a thumbprint on a still wet glossy?

Kathlynn, you too have joined in this succession,

Of people who have documented 

And of people who have been documented.

There is something left of you, too,

Still, here on my wall, an oil painting, trichromatic, smells like

Southeast Richland county,

In August, as weeds grow up around fenceposts,

Hiding crickets from hungry white chickens that scratched earth.

While calf suckles and cow chews cud

And farmer--frozen in time--lives in 

Photograph, and painting, and memory

Of Claremont, Illinois in 1943.

Beatbox

There is a story in the news about keeping hearts fresh
After harvesting them from corpses.
They beat for a while in a box:
A beatbox, I guess.

Here in this box,
The dead heart beats
Until it is placed inside a living body:
A different kind of beatbox.

How long will it live there
No one can guess.
Maybe it will be cut out again,
Replaced by a beatier heart.

Does the poet need to call attention to this?
Is this not a strange and magical world?
Full of Tin Men,
Full of beatboxes?

There is a ticking inside my heart, too.
But when my box dies,
Cut out this heart and feed it to blackbirds,
Crows and ravens.

And if they will not have it,
Feed it to the vultures,
Who know better than anyone about
The making of life from corpses.

My heart, then, will return to its brothers
Who eat life and make life,
Eating and beating upon itself as
Uroboros or Chronophage.

The beating never stops.

On a Friday Night

The fireplace crackles with explosion of steam and cellulose,
Snapping like bubble wrap,
And there lies Joe, old dog, best dog,
Warm and arthritic.

Proposition Joe is no replacement for Avon Barksdale.
Marlo is no Stringer Bell.
The fourth season was mostly wasted.
Here I begin, with Joe, my evaluation of Season Five.

God, make it mean something--
Like Tony Soprano meant to me:
To be aware of our own storiness
Is no small feat.

Nathan Fisher, too, taught me this:
To live for today,
For this fire,
For my beautiful and loyal yellow dog,

Who warms himself by this fire,
Orange and yellow and red and crackly,
In Autumn,
On a Friday night.

Snow Leopard

My laptop tells me I have seven minutes left on my battery.
It's nice to know how much time I have left, but it makes me worry that I won't get the job done.
Or that I'll finish this poem before it's good and ready.

Half-baked.

After all, we had sworn that we would forget all the Spanish that we had ever learned--
That time when we snuck back across the border, from Mexico.
Pounding the pavement. Sun scorching the crown of our heads.

I have only five minutes left, which is good to know.

Then there was that other time, when we came back from Canadia,
And those portly security police gave us the business
Threatening us with a $20,000 fine.

Four.

Do you think it will be that way on the other side?
When we cross the border again,
The final time?

Three.

Even when you are expecting it, it goes quicker than you hope.

Two.

And so much is left undone. Unsaid.

One.

It really won't make much sense.

In the end.

Milford

I saw a picture of you the other day;

It was taken in that shitty apartment where you lived with my man Tito.

Ade was there, and Noah.

And you were eating tortilla chips

All together

On that couch where Shop Kitty lived,

Where Miles schooled me,

And I slept until 6:00 a.m.

Before walking back to the hotel

In the rain.

There are all of those books on that bookshelf behind you,

And that table with the soldering iron, bicycle cogs, tin cans, and

A dead sparrow.

Tito never didn't roll a fag.

The picture is yellowed with incandescence:

It's not the way it was, but it gives a sense of the way it was--

Warm, cozy,

Fucking too hot in August.

But it glows, that image, and it's all blurry with too little light or too much motion.

It messes with my mind, you looking down into that salsa bowl,

Ade looking at me, right through me,

Like she's the only one who knows.

You know, Mils, as a guy rolls through life--

Chewing phat with homies and whatnot,

And--being an asshole--not being down with what's down--

It passes.

And then it's gone.

. . .

It's a picture, see: it's not real now.

That's the point I'm trying to make.

Occupancy

Nothing 

Is fulfilling

As emptiness.

A heart acutely aware of vacancy,

Leaves no space

For occupancy

Of joy,

Of contentment,

Of pride,

Of satisfaction,

Of love.

The heart must break to make room.

October

It's always so depressing when October comes and goes,
Passing without a whisper,
Sneaking upon us like children holding toilet paper
Behind prickly, twiggy bushes.

I tried to get your attention the other day
To tell you about how I was feeling about all of this,
But you were busy, it seemed to me, and I was busy, too, I suppose.
Thus, it passed.

Instead, I shuffled through the brown oak leaves that were
Filling up the ditches and overflowing the sidewalks,
Falling from the old pin oak in my father's front yard,
Where grey squirrels bark as acorns drop like hailstones.

Looking down the street, I saw November coming quickly,
And I wished I had bothered to make you listen before it was too late.
But that is the way it goes, I suppose,
In October, as we walk too hastily toward winter, in all the confidence of summer.

Reticence

Sometimes
What you meant to say
Was the farthest thing from your mind.
Other times,
Though,
There are things
You never should have said.
Such as this--
Or that other thing--
That you regretted.

How fortunate it is
To recognize the difference
Between earnestness
And desperation.

Cohort

Here it is:

We walk this planet alone together.

Some of us will live.

Some of us will die.

And others will follow.

Today you join me in this cohort of strangers,

Each to his own,

Like passengers on a train,

Moving in all directions

All at once.

I approached you on the train and asked for a cigarette,

But you said you didn't smoke.

So I smiled politely, put my hands into my pockets, and returned to my seat.

The conductor stopped the train, and you left without looking at me.

I remained in my seat, and waited for my stop,

Looking around at strangers,

Hoping for someone to share a cigarette

With.

Hairs on a Head

I found a dead bird in my basement tonight--
An odd final resting place for a sparrow.
It had been creating a stink in my bathroom,
Oozing through the floorboards and into my nostrils,
Seeking escape from the cold and damp,
Demanding to be missed.

One Fourteen

On most days,
One fourteen passes unnoticed.

But today I saw it,
And time stood still.

I held it under my power, and it did not move
For forty-three seconds.

Though it was my gift to you,
You did not notice.

Eight Movements on Sunday Morning

1
April daffodils and a solitary blade of grass.
Eddies of breeze carry cheeps and twirps
Of cardinals and robins
As two houses away the grass is cut.
The dull roar of Briggs and Stratton
Fights against the barking of squirrels,
Blue violets and mustard weed.
Can the world awaken before it is trod down?
Winter's yellow grass is still not overtaken
Before this blade of grass is cut down to size,
Nor the last of the brown oak leaves raked and burnt:
Cain's sacrifice, less satisfying than the steaks
Put on the grill at noon.
A tall glass of iced tea.
St. Louis versus Milwaukee.

2
Twelve years old I begin.
At thirty-three no difference.
Nor should there be, nor can there be.
In the eyes there is no change,
Nor in the heart.
What enters the soul through the eyes, ears, lungs
Remains for an eternity of a single life.
Bluebirds, Red-winged Blackbirds, dusty cornfields
Mown down since October,
Leaving stock and stibble to scratch my shins against
As I walk into a patch of trees, where mushrooms grow.
Tiny morels, awakening from beneath the detritus,
They appear:
One and one and two and three.
Enough to fill a plastic sack I pull from my hip pocket.

3
Where are you now, Voice of Winter?
Where are you now, Dead Man?
Where is Golgotha and Sunday School?
It is there in the heart,
With mushrooms, and blackbirds, and daffodils,
Speaking audibly:
There are other words than these.
There are other ears.
It makes no difference.
I die, too, and lie down to detritus,
Feeding mushrooms,
Waiting to be picked by scamperers,
Feeding daffodils,
Waiting to be picked by girls in summer dresses
Where are you, Man of Silence?

4
The sparrow has taken note of me,
And she calls the alert to her partner
To protect their nest of three speckled eggs.
I would climb into the bushes to take down the nest
Of dead grasses woven together,
A fitting bed for new birth.
I would take the eggs into my hands and admire them
Despite their rancourousness.
When the shell is cracked, and the viscous ooze
Of protein and yolk
Stickies my fingers,
It will be another beginning and end of beginnings,
As it always has been
And never will be.
The wood bees are not pleased. The dog will destroy them.

5
But still there are things that must be done.
The toilet must be flushed. The dinnerware put away.
There is an order that can not be overturned.
And businessmen and businesswomen will seek advanced degrees
To enjoy steak on Sunday afternoon,
And the blade of grass will be cut by ZTR yard machines.
There is no difference.
The wildebeest is slain by the cheetah,
And the magpie by the fox,
Leaving a mess of feathers behind.
Poor birds. Poor cattle. Poor blade of grass.
Poor unhatched egg that lies crushed on the playground
As children, smiling, swing higher and higher,
Giggling,
In ecstasy of sun and breeze and songbirds.

6
In the beginning was the Word.
The Word was God.
It was with God.
The Word was God.
It was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by Him.
Nothing was made without Him.
In Him was Life,
And that Life was the Light of Man.
The Light shines in Darkness,
But the Darkness has not overcome It,
Nor has the It comprehended It.
Oh, indefatigable Word!
Oh, inexcusable Darkness!
Oh, irreconcilable Knowing!

7
Twelve planets aligned in a far away solar system,
On which there may or may not have been single-cellular organisms.
But the alignment meant very much to those of us who gaze upon the Heavens
Through telescopes and horoscopes,
Searching for the Word
In bricks and mortar and Pyramids of Giza.
I saw one one, once: a spaceship.
It fell down silently, but the songbirds took no note of it.
Still, there was Golgotha,
But the blade of grass took no notice either.
Nor should it, being itself of the Plant Kingdom,
And without Soul,
Without the Blood of the Testimony,
And with no need of reconciliation
To the Word.

8
All you laborers and lovers, hear me!
All you who dance and sing, hear me!
All you who cut grass and flush toilets, hear me!
All you who sing hymns and spirituals, hear me!
All you who rob nests, hear me!
All you who look skyward, hear me!
I do not not cease!
I do not begin!
Nor do I cease to begin!
A blade of grass.
A sparrow's egg.
My hands, my feet, my side.
Let us take communion with each other,
Glutting ourselves with bread and blood.
There is hope yet for us.

Good Friday

Jesus Christ was 33 years old when the Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross.

Before that day, he was quite a public speaker.

Now, some 1,977 years later, I, too, am 33 years old,

But with much less public speaking experience,

And no cross to climb upon.

Yes, I am sorry. It is always this way.

I love you.



                              There, I've said it.


Life can now proceed so much more
        awkwardly

   now.

I hope you feel better

                      now

         about

     all of this

now.

Hills Like A Break from Grading Online Essays

"What are you working on?" the girl asked.

"The wrong thing," he replied.

"It's always that way," she huffed.

"Yeah. It is."

"So, whaddya gonna do about it?"

"Nothing, probably."

He kept his head down and would not look her in the eye.

"Can't you even just look at me when we're talking?"

"No. I don't suppose I can."

"And why not?"

"Seems like the right thing to do. It's not my style."

"Oh, you are a bore."

"Yes. I know."

The Fourteenth Way

There were three things the blackbird told me:

Forget
Remember
Know

Which came first, I cannot recall. Which came last was Death.

I killed the blackbird, though. It kept screeching in my ear.

Writing Lesson #2

Take something beautiful: a rose.
Place it next to something unbeautiful: a corpse.

a rose
a corpse

There is emotion in naming that does not require explication. Nor must you remind the reader of their father's father who was lying stiff and cold in a grey striped suit. They will find those places on their own. Nor need you remind them of pockets nor posies. They will remember the playground, or Aunt Sonia's gardens, or the undertaker, wheeling death from the hospital elevator under a blanket of red velvet.

Try another.

Take something mechanical: a conveyor belt.
Place it next to something biological: an earthworm.

a conveyor belt
an earthworm

Mess with the articles. Definite and indefinite change things.

a conveyor belt
the earthworm

Allow your reader to think for himself. Do not tell him that the conveyor belt is moving, slowly, nor that the worm is crawling, quickly, yet too slowly, nor that there is doom at the end, nor that there is a will moving the machine against the will moving, and crawling, and leaving a small, wet, slimy trail on the black rubber. Do not tell him that the worm is the conveyor; though that, too, is possible.

Take something abstract: forgetfulness.
Place it next to something concrete: coconuts

forgetfulness
coconuts

And do not tell the reader stories about gravity and slapstick cartoons, nor draw analogies between nut and brain. These things happen in multitudes, and there is no need for you to draw the distinctions so clearly. Nor should you force feed alliteration. Can you understand this, Evangeline? Or should I have called you Pyotr the Magnificent?

Hrumph! Are you disappointed that I did not say your name, Steve?

Cindy?

Frandreka?

Jelle Van Everdingen?

You must master the art of suggestion: Names are quite subjective.

Don't Put the Blame on You

So you might ask: WHY AM I WRITING THIS? That's pretty much what I was thinking about it but here goes. STEP 1: WHAT IS THE RIGHT QUESTION? Well, if there was something that a person (OK ME!) wanted to ask about it, then maybe it would be OK (like the CORRAL). So anyway. STEP 2: ASKING? If you knew someone who wanted a person who might be able to help, OK I'll just SAY IT. But when I would ask my mother, and then she would get upset, so I don't really ask as much. STEP 3: CAN A PERSON REALLY GUESS THE FUTURE? You know, a TIME MACHINE? And you might say no, but then again I don't know but in a way I DO because I am WRITING THIS. STEP 5: CLEANUP. Here goes,  Did you ever notice that when someone wants something, and sometimes when they ask it takes them A LOT, but still when there is a lot of SMOKE then it takes a lot of TIME too for a first-grader.  OK, nevermind about THAT. But that's really what it was in the first place. So anyway, the MAIN THING that it was is I wondering about the FUTURE (Jules VERN). And if someone could really go as fast in a Delorian as MICHAEL J. FOX with garbage in a nucular explosion then it would probably make fire. Because some people don't believe about the fire tracks like my brother did, but that is ANOTHER STORY. STEP 6: GOING BACK IN TIME: My brother and I used to play under the table with a sheet on the table and we HID from our MOM (AKA, NOT HAPPY). And maybe if a person (AKA, ME) could use a time machine, but then again it wouldn't happen as much. But I am not saying if it was MY fault (it WASN'T) but then again WHO KNOWS? OK, and that brings me to another thing: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? Just thinking about Aretha Franklin and it all makes sense: R-E-S-P-E-C-T! The only other thing was my brother because if I COULD (AKA: TIME MACHINE) then I would not have done it. But still, it was HIS fault.

The Exorcism of Brainard Dale

busting down the mississippi
with my halo I feel trippy

want to play with mike and skippy

on an ordinary hippie

i can't tell if i am slipping 

on the road or i am tripping

fake it now i wont be skipping

over me the skies are ripping 

for an hour i'll be sleeping

now that day is over reaping

comes to end as golden peeping

down the tunnel i keep seeping

take me now that i am stooping

down to using words like pooping

it's a blast to rhyme with pooping

i can't seem to stop it pooping

i don't know where this is pooping

give me one or two or pooping

stop it now i wont stop pooping

pooping pooping pooping pooping

A. D.

It was the future, and the boy and girl were very old.

"Seems like we've been here before," he said.

"Yes, but it's beautiful," she replied. Her voice fell dead on a blanket of snow.

The sun was setting behind the Wisconsin tree line. Shards of light poured through the winter branches, like God escaping through clenched fists.

"Yeah, it is." 

A snowflake fell between them.

It is the present, and the boy and girl are still very young. 

"This is such a beautiful place," she sighed.

"Yes. It is."

He kicked into the sand with his boot, uncovering a shard of broken glass. She stared intently into the horizon. The sun rose through the mist: a pale ball of white behind the Lake Michigan fog. The girl walked into the mist, and disappeared.

Later, there was talking, and music, and tequila, and a glass of red wine. The boy with the guitar waited for a turn.

They stood on a stage in Little Rock. A mockingbird whistled in a Louisiana Live Oak.

In another time and another place, I went to the Gypsy and paid her five dollars. I asked her about the boy and the girl.

"What's you' sign, mistuh?" she asked.

I told her it was the Volcano.

"Ain't noboody gwine take duh Volcano," she said. Then she laughed at me and said that  I had no business with the boy and the girl. But she kept the five-dollar bill.

It was later, and the songs were finished. The bartender was washing glasses, and hangers-on were mingling.

"I've seen this before," she said. "It was always so beautiful."

"Do you think anyone will remember it like this?" he asked. 

She had no answer, so she lowered her eyes. He lit a cigarette and walked off the stage.

Now it's winter, and the geese are flying southward, down the Illinois Valley, down the Mississippi River, down toward Memphis. The air is biting.

"What's left?" she asks.

"Nothing, babe. Wasn't there to start, anyway."

"But didn't you see it?"

"Yeah. I did."

The train stopped in Balitmore. It was the end of the line. The conductor asked for their tickets, but they said they didn't have any, so he kicked them out of first class. They had to carry their gear to the 9:30 because they didn't have money for a cab.

"This is it, babe."

It wasn't as seedy as she'd imagined. Still, an odor lingered. 

They played until midnight, and the manager paid them in cash. Afterwards, they returned to the conductor and gave him a hundred dollars for his trouble. They took a cab. When the train left for Phoenix, they stood on the tracks waving goodbye. From the caboose, the conductor waved a white handkerchief as he disappeared into the sunset.

"It's so beautiful here," she said.

"Yes," he said. "It's just like I remember it." 

"Do you think anyone else is noticing this?"

"I am."

The boy picked up his guitar case and walked up the stairs to the platform. He sat alone on a bench and strummed an E chord, then walked his fingers down tinny strings with eerie twang. The girl stood on the tracks and lifted her chin, her cheeks illumined with golden red as thunder rolled from the West. Down in the holler, Blind Willie lifted his voice to the Volcano, and all the lovers trembled at the rending of the sky.

For Angie

One
or Two
Is All

Three is One
And Two

All divisible by One
None divisible by None

All multiply into All
All add into All

There is One in Three
There is One in Four

More?

Not in Division.

All is more than we imagine.
We approach it discretely.

As One
And Two
And Three.

More is difficult.

Calculus

Yin

There are two choices:
To create, or to not create.
Both are acts of creation,
And neither are choices.

Or maybe that's not true, too.

(Revision #1)

There is only one choice: To create.

(Revision #2)

Nobody knows what the hell is going on.

(Revision #3)

Josh McDowell once said: "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."

(Revision #4)

Slice moon scold had Jew: "Acorn. Tree. Falcon. Talon. Fist. I. Destiny. Rust. Off. Active. Acorn."

(Revision #5)

Look for me under your boot-soles.

Yang

Smell the Devil, or Dirty Black People, or My Life as a Missionary

Yes, it's ugly.

And foul.

This mind. These walls. This wallpaper. The curtains in my brain.

I remember being told that the first thing out of a person's mouth is usually the truth. It is the subsequent obfuscation that does the real damage.

And Truth is hard to swallow.

If you're a rat.

Or a dung beetle. Pushing dung up a steep, steep hill.

I saw that once, you know. In Haiti, climbing up the cobblestone pathway to the Citadel, where Napoleon was beat back by the blood of Haitians, black skinned, and evil, like the Devil, like the Devil's own children, sold into slavery and voodoo and sin. Baptized into evil. I saw the pond, the muddy water, where the voodoo curse was consummated, and they were drowned into death. To escape the white man. To bury their faces in the hairy chest of the Devil, and to breathe in his fatherliness and love and protection like the sweat of a horse.

The hashish dealer was so skinny and gaunt, like the terrier that hadn't eaten for three weeks, or months. It is hard to tell when a dog is so skinny. How long could it possibly live?

I don't know. But I also saw one that was fat and bloated, lying dead by the side of a road. And it was hot, and the animal was fat like a dead hog, full of puss and vinegar. Satiated by Death.

He looked at me with desperate eyes and opened his palms to me (The man, or the dog? you ask.) and he offered me the drug, brown and dirty, like a ball of dung. To be smoked. But he did not understand that I did not want to forget like he wants to forget. He thought he would do me a favor, but I wanted to do him the favor instead. But I didn't know how, except to offer him a smile, and to pray for his soul when he offered me hashish.

In the garbage, in the dump, in the last light of dusk and glow of kerosene lamp, and surrounded by the smell of hot and sweat and human body both clean and unclean and desirable and repulsive and sexual and holy and sickening. Surrounding me, they were, the black devil faces, and the white eyes and the yellow kerosene flame fading into darkness at the back of the shack in the back of the dump where we accessed the road over paper and banana peels and refuse and little food.

There.

It is there in my brain.

And I turn softly
and tenderly
to myself
and to they who were there.

I am sad that I did not love them, but brought love to them: it is a very Christian thing to do.

Yet not fulfilling, nor good.

But there was a girl, who was 16 and beautiful and perfect like the sunset. The tarantulas skittered across the grass and sometimes floated, under moonlight. And she came to me in white dress with citron and banana chips. Skin soft, delicate, imperfect and smooth and perfect. But she did not know me or the words I spoke.

Procim. Merci, beaucoup.  J'aime beaucoup les enfants. Je suis. Oui, merci. Ou est la piscine?

It is not French anyway. It is a bastard language, of colonizer and slave. Of France and Afrika. Jesus and Lucifer. To kiss the Devil, or his daughter, would be a very disturbing thing to do, wouldn't it?

Yet she was beautiful. Though, I imagine, twenty years hence, she is not. Only was. Yet could be, or still is. Or was. Or will be?

No. I suppose it does not matter as much now as it did then. In retrospect it was not much good at all.

But it still is, and must continue to be, despite itself.

Truth, too.

Ravenous

The boiling swell of black feathers presaged unconscionable horror. Still, the Nothing left behind spoke a gruesomeness of its own. Yet in a whisper. Not a scream.

Writing Lesson #1

My sister thinks she cannot write.
But then she wrote this:

"The earthworm/bandaid made me think of a sad story about a boy who thought if he put two frogs in a blender that he would end up with a really big frog."

Do this:

A happy young boy wanted a really big frog,
So he placed two frogs in a blender
And became a sad boy instead.

Or:

Two frogs
In one blender
Are not one frog
In one blender.
But they are, too.

Or:

When the blender erupted
In a WHIR! of splatter
And crushed bone,
Two toads became one,
But less toady.

Or:

To be blended
In a blender
Would be a bad way to die
For a frog
Or for a human being.

Or:

Several frogs that are blended together
Become indistinguishable

Or:

If I wanted a really big frog,
I would go to a pond, on a quiet farm
At night
With a large net
At the end of a long, bamboo stick.
In the black darkness
By the glassy reflection of moon on water
Surrounded by a cacophony
Of croak and ribbit and bulge,
I would lower my net
To the green giant
Who would struggle against capture,
Pulling the nylon web down, down, down
To the bottom of the pond
Into the blue and black and cold.
The giant's weight would bend the thin bamboo
In an elegant curve
As I pulled the king from his slimy citadel.
When I lifted him to the moonlight,
Regarding his blackness against the whiteness of the moon
While water dropped in rivulvets,
Retreating to the black water,
The shaft would not
Break
Like the bones of two toads
In an Osterizer.

Forget the Cheese

I do not remember the first time I tasted Swiss cheese,

Poking my tongue through the flexible eyelets 

Left behind from living gases. 

However, that would be a remarkable memory--

One that I would like to recall.

Nor do I remember the first time I rode a bicycle

Without training wheels.

But I do remember that the bicycle was purple,

And that I was very afraid 

That my father would let go of the white banana seat.

Or was it yellow?

Other things I do not remember include:

The first time I made my mother cry--

Nor when she pulled my first tooth and made me cry--

Learning how to write in cursive,

Unhooking my first fish,

Cutting my fingertips on sharp, tiny teeth.

But there are things I do remember, vividly:

Placing a band-aid on an earthworm I had cut in two pieces,

Drawing hand puppets on my fist in first grade,

Twirling my feet in the long, twisted phone cord

While my mother gossiped on Tuesday mornings,

Lost in conversation.

I also remember pulling a Morel from moist, brown soil:

My father found it first, and he had stopped me

From crushing it with my small foot.

I remember stealing a discarded cigarette from the side of a road,

And smoking it in a toolshed with my best friend.

The smoke poured out in giant white clouds.

What memories are left live in spaces I do not frequent.

They are immovable, yet most certainly suspect:

Stealing eggs from my grandmother's henhouse,

Splatting them against the grey wood of the weathered barn,

Yolks running in viscous rivulets.

My brother did it first.

But I do not remember poking my fingers through the holes of Swiss cheese

Past my knuckles to the palm,

Wiggling four fingers like a puppeteer,

And biting around the edges till no cheese remained, only fingers

In the empty spaces. 

I can not remember this,

But I would like to.