the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 474, March 8, 2004
Edward Dorn (1929-1999)
“I have perceiv’d that to
be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at
evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious,
breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one,
or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this,
then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in
it, as in a sea.”
—Walt Whitman, “I sing the body
electric” from Leaves of Grass
The kids had just started spilling from the front
doors of the school, grade at a time, in graduated waves that kept getting
taller and older.
She was standing among the teachers and other
parents, collecting kids, some obviously her own, with satin-red hair, slight
builds, and their dad’s facial features. Smiling and nodding her head as the
pleasantries flew, she moved slowly about the lines of mothers and teachers, shepherding
the children gathering around with a hand on the backs of their heads.
A breeze came down the street and fluttered the
leaves of the sweetgum and pin oak. It lifted her red hair, now dirtying and
graying with age, up over her glasses.
It was that hair, the silky brown crimson of Indian
paintbrush that had made her stand out of the two and half hundred kids in our
high school freshman class. Back then, she wore the same skirts her kids wore,
but noticeably second-hand. Her shirts were never bleached white, and they were
worn about the collars.
I knew the color of Indian paintbrush when I was a
freshman because the outdoors had been the only place I had ever felt safe when
I was a kid. That world, far from people who could harm me, was filled with
things I could count on, things whose nature and habits didn’t change. Indian
paintbrush, in its millions of variations, always stood above knots of
buffalograss in a forest glade. It raised it’s flag in meadows, and among the
paper poppies that grew around the edges of woods. I could find it, in any
season, whenever I wanted. It was reliable, a reminder that nothing in the
world could touch me.
I stood with my back against the No Parking sign,
trying to escape the memories of that time. Trying not to remember the way her
breasts rubbed her nipples against the fabric of her white shirts. Trying to
break away from the lock the past still held on me all these years later.
“Henry,” she said, turning from the lines of screams
and squeals. “Henry, how’re things going?”
What do you say when a woman who has so moved your
life asks you a question like this. All right? Certainly, you do. Adult people
with wives and husbands and children are polite, mature to one another. But it
is a lie when you are standing with your back against a street sign and your
feet planted firmly in a past you still don’t understand.
“All right,” I said. “Things are good. How’re you?”
It had been years since I had first felt the pangs of
lust and longing for her. She was skinny, walked with the limp she was born
with, and had the ivory-white skin and freckles that comes with red hair. Few
among the clique of beautiful, money endowed kids would have much to do with
her. She and I were equals, in many ways, kids who lived on the fringes,
outside the popular life of the school.
She walked toward me, bringing the children along
with her. It was odd, really, how age and maturity had integrated her into the
mainstream of life among the parents at the school. She felt comfortable with them,
talked with an open smile, and seemed genuinely happy to be there.
She was still beautiful. Slender and tall, with the
ice-blue eyes I remembered when on our first, disastrous date, and all the
failed attempts thereafter. Kisses and closer touches stolen on dark nights in
automobiles, jugs of wine, and rancid smoke from tiny, ill-crafted joints. The
days turned into months and years, and all the memories, unfulfilled desires,
wishes, and regrets.
And now she walked up with her kids. Just how to deal
with a girl turned into a woman when I was still a child stuck in a past I
couldn’t right. That was the issue. It made me feel so cliché, so much a part
of the great mass of humanity that surrounded swirled around in the schoolyard,
the neighborhood, the city.
epoch
at birth,
add up all the revolutions
of all the world’s wheels,
toothed gears, fans, flywheels,
clock hands, balls rolling
across playgrounds,
and all other round things
turning,
multiply by two,
take the number
each morning,
multiply by two again,
into next month, year,
decades
at thirty-two feet per second
squared
breaths becomes sight,
until near the speed of light,
you can touch silence,
taste the immobility
that at nine months or ninety years,
delivers you home
send short poems, short thoughts, fictions, or
nonfictions to the poetrysheet, where whimsy, subversion, dodging reality are our
highest values
submit/whimsy/subversion/bowling/archive
Poetry News!/contact/subscribe
all
material copyright poetrysheet and
personally recommended press, unless otherwise arranged with the authors. for
information, contact rev. patrick dobson,
1132 e. 65th st., kansas city, mo, 64131, 816-333-7303.