Childhood Ideogram

I lay my head sideways on the desk,

My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,

My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,

White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree.

From where I sat, on still days, I'd watch

The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read

The desk carved with adults' names: Marietta

Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm;

The wood hacked or lovingly hollowed, the flies

Settling on the obsolete & built-in inkwells.

I remember, tonight, only details, how

Mrs. Avery, now gone, was standing then

In her beige dress, its quiet, gazelle print

Still dark with lines of perspiration from

The day before; how Gracie Chin had just

Shown me how to draw, with chalk, a Chinese

Ideogram. Where did she go, white thigh

With one still freckle, lost in silk?

No one would say for sure, so that I'd know,

So that all shapes, for days after, seemed

Brushstrokes in Chinese: countries on maps

That shifted, changed colors, or disappeared:

Lithuania, Prussia, Bessarabia;

The numbers four & seven; the question mark.

That year, I ate almost nothing.

I thought my parents weren't my real parents,

I thought there'd been some terrible mistake.

At recess I would sit alone, seeing

In the print of each leaf shadow, an ideogram—

Still, indecipherable, beneath the green sound

The bell still made, even after it had faded,

When the dust-covered leaves of the oak tree

Quivered, slightly, if I looked up in time.

And my father, so distant in those days,

Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose

The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had

To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle

By a plum tree, the sun rising over

The Sierras? It is not Chinese, but English—

When the past tense, when you first learn to use it

As a child, throws all the verbs in the language

Into the long, flat shade of houses you

Ride past, & into town. Your father's driving.

On winter evenings, the lights would come on earlier.

People would be shopping for Christmas. Each hand,

With the one whorl of its fingerprints, with twenty

Delicate bones inside it, reaching up

To touch some bolt of cloth, or choose a gift,

A little different from any other hand.

You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark,

But leaves names, lovers, places showing through:

Gracie Chin, my father, Lithuania;

A beige dress where dark gazelles hold still?

Outside, it's snowing, cold, & a New Year.

The trees & streets are turning white.

I always thought he would come back like this.

I always thought he wouldn't dare be seen.