A Happy Childhood

My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.

“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.

I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air

like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved

like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.

I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded

soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.

Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing

to myself all day like a fieldful of August

insects, just things I whisper, really,

a trance in sneakers. I’m learning

to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school,

I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air               

goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,

a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-

side park. I love to be called for dinner.

Spot goes out and I go in and the lights

in the kitchen go on and the dark,

which also has a body like a cloud’s,

leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow

I’ll find the sweat stains it left, little grey smudges.

Here’s a sky no higher than a street lamp,

and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire.

It’s 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle,

minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow;

and here’s our sleep-sodden paperboy

with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog,

his unclouding face set for paper route

like an alarm clock. Here’s a memory

in the making, for this could be the morning

he doesn’t come home and his parents

two hours later drive his route until

they find him asleep, propped against a street lamp,

his papers all delivered and his dirty paper-

satchel slack, like an emptied lung,

and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning

air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue

through which a last few dandruff-flecks

of snow meander casually down.

The dog squeaks in out of the dark,

snuffling me too me too. And here he goes

home to memory, and to hot chocolate

on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice,

and to the long and ordinary day,

school, two triumphs and one severe

humiliation on the playground, the past

already growing its scabs, the busride home,

dinner, and evening leading to sleep

like the slide that will spill him out, come June,

into the eye-reddening chlorine waters

of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed.

Kiss. Kiss. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark.

Here the dog lies down by his bed,

and sighs and farts. Will he always be

this skinny, chicken-bones?

He’ll remember like a prayer

how his mother made breakfast for him

every morning before he trudged out

to snip the papers free. Just as

his mother will remember she felt

guilty never to wake up with him

to give him breakfast. It was Cream

of Wheat they always or never had together.

It turns out you are the story of your childhood

and you’re under constant revision,

like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks

are all the selves you’ve been, lifelong,

shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk.

And each of these selves had a childhood

it traded for love and grudged to give away,

now lost irretrievably, in storage

like a set of dishes from which no food,

no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard

sauce, nor even a single raspberry,

can be eaten until the afterlife,

which is only childhood in its last

disguise, all radiance or all humiliation,

and so it is forfeit a final time.

In fact it was awful, you think, or why

should the piecework of grief be endless?

Only because death is, and likewise loss,

which is not awful, but only breathtaking.

There’s no truth about your childhood,

though there’s a story, yours to tend,

like a fire or garden. Make it a good one,

since you’ll have to live it out, and all

its revisions, so long as you all shall live,

for they shall be gathered to your deathbed,

and they’ll have known to what you and they

would come, and this one time they’ll weep for you.

The map in the shopping center has an X

signed “you are here.” A dream is like that.

In a dream you are never eighty, though

you may risk death by other means:

you’re on a ledge and memory calls you

to jump, but a deft cop talks you in

to a small, bright room, and snickers.

And in a dream, you’re everyone somewhat,

but not wholly. I think I know how that

works: for twenty-one years I had a father

and then I became a father, replacing him

but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers.

Surely, that’s what middle-aged means,

being father and son to sons and father.

That a male has only one mother is another

story, told wherever men weep wholly.

Though nobody’s replaced. In one dream

I’m leading a rope of children to safety,

through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out

and I have to throw snowballs well to him

so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know

he’s my father, at ease in his catcher’s

squat, and that the dream has revived

to us both an old unspoken fantasy:

we’re a battery. I’m young, I’m brash,

I don’t know how to pitch but I can

throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he

can handle pitchers and control a game.

I look to him for a sign. I’d nod

for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip

without seams, and I don’t rely only

on my live, young arm, but throw by all

the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs

toward him no faster than the snow

in the dream drifts down. Nothing

takes forever, but I know what the phrase

means. The children grow more cold

and hungry and cruel to each other

the longer the ball’s in the air, and it begins

to melt. By the time it gets to him we’ll be

our waking ages, and each of us is himself

alone, and we all join hands and go.

Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof

like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey

and that green you see just under the surface

of water, a shimmer more than a color.

Time to dive back into sleep, as if into

happiness, that neglected discipline ....

In those sixth-grade book reports

you had to say if the book was optimistic

or not, and everyone looked at you

the same way: how would he turn out?

He rolls in his sleep like an otter.

Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it’s funny,

and on the way to work he pries the cap

off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn’t cool one weary

thing for long; it’s gonna be a cooker.

The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat

on his upper lip, as if waking itself,

becoming explicit, were hard work.

Who knows if he’s happy or not?

A child is all the tools a child has,

growing up, who makes what he can.