2008 Poems - Reflections on my childhood.

Living Things

In the summer
my family camped near a small forest
where wild peacocks roamed,
their mewing waking us, sometimes,
in the extra black night of the countryside.
And during the hot days,
my brothers showed me how a lizard
could survive without its tail,
and teased me for the way my face puckered
when I sucked on a Warhead.
My father took us canoeing around the lake
and we discovered new worlds on
islands rimmed with floating ducks.
In the shallows of the lake,
we found a dying fish
and brought it to our doctor/father,
our hope dying as he shook his head,
and told us to take it back,
where it struggled, jerking and splashing,
for as long as we could bear to watch.



A Year on Pocahontas Drive
Boston, MA, age 4

Wordsworth's daffodils remind me
of the blooms I picked from my neighbor's garden without asking
and the disapproval on my mother's face
as she filled a glass of water for them.

Then I remember the forest in our backyard.
My brother and the other boys explored it daily,
but they only took me with them once;
my boots made squelching noises in the mud.

There were pinecones the size of thimbles in my front yard,
and we collected them in my mother's Longaberger baskets
with the little girl from down the street. She had short hair
and a perpetual frown, and she never returned my doll.

From there I muse on the shocking grass green carpeting
of my old bedroom, and the light that shone through
the open doorway during the only storm
that has ever scared me.

When winter came, I went sledding with my father,
and my mother cut the dead skin from my lips with
a tiny pair of silver scissors. And once, my brother
tricked me into believing that being buried in snow
was just like being buried in sand.
We have pictures of my raw-red, furious little face.




Summer, 1992

The shattered, stained glass shards
of its wings
catching light in the hot sun
blinds me, even in my memory.
And that piercing --
the sharp way I sucked the air into me --
I relive it every time
I think of this --
the butterfly,
dead on the sidewalk,
its yellow blood on the sole of my shoe.



Still Yours

In many ways I haven't changed.
I am still the one-year-old with a red baby sister
in her lap, and a beauty of a brother
peering over her shoulder.
The seven-year-old holding the pear,
in that blue checkered dress.
I am still the same little girl,
who dressed up as Raggedy Ann
on Halloween Day and who
climbed a ladder to see the bird's nest
in the tree by her front door.
The same girl who once dreamt of
blood in the mini-van and woke up
scared. Who touched the splintered wood
where her puppy chewed on the table legs.
Who pretended to be asleep
at slumber parties,
and watched the cat stretch out,
lazily, in the square patch of sun
shining on the carpet.