While Walking Downtown with My Daughter

Across the street, a block away, a man
dressed as a clown trudges to the back
of a plain gray sedan and pops the trunk.
He pulls his yellow wig off of his nearly
bald head and packs it carefully away,
then his bright nose-ball with both hands.
then his candy red jacket with gold trim,
folded and lowered gently into the trunk.
By the time we cross the street, he’s standing
in a yellow shirt and jeans, a short man,
a little overweight. He looks nervous.
But just as we are about to pass behind
the church at the corner, he raises his round,
white painted face to us, lifts his hand
off of the trunk to wave and starts a smile,
just as we disappear behind the church,
that looked like it was going to keep spreading
off of his face and fall like some magical
crescent moon into the trunk of his car.

Strawberry

"And home they went as fast as they could go, over the bridge, up the road, through the meadow, and under the fence. And there, sure enough...." (The Poky Little Puppy)

I

My favorite part of The Poky Little Puppy
is where he finds a strawberry growing
on the ground and it means that someone
is making strawberry shortcake at home.
Since I first heard the story I’ve waited
through smelling the rice pudding
and hearing the chocolate custard
for that magical strawberry in the grass
that the puppy knew to sniff and all
of his brothers knew the meaning of.
What better to make a young boy look
at a woman’s shoe he finds one day
damming up the rain gutter, and smell
the impossible, god sent aroma of love
filling his whole being from the sinuses
out, with anticipation of a day he can’t
possibly brace himself for, one he’ll fall
asleep to every night for the rest of his life.

II

But I recall that it was after the strawberry
that the poky puppy learned his lesson.
He plodded back, over the bridge with it’s red
bark of curling paint and bowed wooden slats,
up the road with weeds growing between the ruts,
across the meadow full of dragonflies, and up
to the fence where the hole was now filled in.
As he stood outside, looking for a wide hole
in the fence to squeeze through, I’m sure
his head was heavy with images: the ripe
berry, numinous as a burning bush; his mother,
stern and wise, waiting for him inside; and
a new one, with no face, no name, and no place
in his heart yet–the one that keeps us up too,
wondering at the powers that put things
down in the grass for us, and the ones
that devour them before we know their meaning.

Meeting Place

My brother told me once, as he cut
the venison from the deer he’d shot
that week, that the first time
he shot one, he cried. He cried
because he’d removed something
beautiful from the world.

Yesterday, a deer swept across
the road in front of my car, my lights
on his hide making her look
like a ghost that I could drive
into like a fog and she’d burst
like swiped candle smoke.

My wife hit a deer on the highway
and came home well but trembling.
The car had a dent and deer flesh
in the grill. She felt lucky and guilty.
She felt her mortality like an ache
and worried helplessly about the deer.

I imagine the hunter crying with one
knee in the leaves, leaning on the gun
he’s holding in his gloved hand,
saying a prayer that isn’t asking forgiveness,
isn’t blessing the hot bleeding body,
but rather a prayer that comes easily

from the place where two beautiful
bodies have come together and one
of them stands, one of them falls;
one of them dies and one of them
kneels at the meeting place where
there’s one living heart still meeting.

Nine Years Old, Visiting Gene DeGruson's House

My dad needed to pick up something
he’d left at Gene’s house. An errand–
one of those little tasks adults do that means
you sit in the car or tag along feeling
that second flesh of boredom grow.

He parked the car at the curb
and showed me which way to walk.
Just over the trees I saw the tower,
with a roof that looked like a kite.
Just inside the trees, the house
was a stone monastery under
the broken prow of a fast ship.
The house was not a place for any
kind of adult that I knew. Only
a madman could live there. A recluse
in a lab coat pacing a room full
of red smoke and cobwebs of glass
vials and pipettes--maybe a whole
roomful of madmen, chained to stone
block walls, shouting manifestoes,
and clicking their foot-long fingernails.

We went inside, the door left open because
Gene was out that day, got whatever
it was Dad needed, and drove back home.
I sat in front seat, with ideas about what
it means to be adult, years of them,
drifting like broken moths’ wings
out of my head and through the open
window of that very quiet car.

Elementary School

Even if I looked like I was paying attention
I would often forget what class I was in.
The carpet was as hard as dirt road and paved
with gold squares, each containing a circle
that would fit my spread-out hand to the fingertips.

There was a square patch of carpet worn down
to the sinew where the wheeled cart stood,
with it's black rubber mats on both shelves
and its cold metal frame painted a color
precisely centered between green and blue.

On the cart was the breathing swan body
of the the projector, its brightly lit
organs visible though the fan vent,
and its two glass eyes on its bent head,
one looking out and one looking in.

The projector dumped its light out
on the roll-down screen where you could see
the shadow of the pond-ripple glass plate,
the permanent smudges, and the scratches
that stayed when the teacher pulled the transparency.

When the teacher walked past, the screen
would breathe. If the door opened or closed,
it would jump and the words on it would
bend like leather over your elbow and slip
about the screen like a sonnet on the water.

Even if I looked like I was paying attention
I would often forget I was in the music room.
Now the lights come on, the projector's heart
cools to a stop. The teacher says to find
our places. Everyone but me moves.

Each has place they know is theirs, the place
just shown to them on the bright screen
in the dark room with the shining windows.
Each has something to do in their place.
I look at the circles again and wait.