Seventh Birthday of the First Child

The children were around my feet like dogs,
milling, nipping, wetting, slavering,
feed sieving from their chops like plankton.

I slid on their messes, I found their silky bodies
asleep in corners, paws fallen
north, south, east, west,
little sexes gleaming.

Ankle-deep in their smell, their noise,
their noses cold and black
or going soft with fever, I waded, I slogged.

Crowding around my toes like tits,
they taught me to walk carefully,
to hold still to be sucked.
I worked my feet in them like mud
for the pleasure.

And suddenly there is a head at my breastbone
as if one of the litter had climbed
onto the branch of a dwarf tree
which overnight grew to here
bearing you up, daughter, with your dark
newborn eyes. You sit in the boughs,
blossoms breaking like porcelain cups around you.

:: Sharon Olds, Satan Says (1980)

Mirage

We’re driving to visit my aunt and uncle
in Massachusetts when my father decides
he can’t drive anymore with five screaming kids
in the back so he jerks to a stop at a roadside motel.
In the car, we wait as he checks in,
the upholstery slick with sweat and drool
and the spittle of insult. Our first motel
ever. Behind us, the small pool glows
the blue of imagined clarity, a holy water font
with a diving board. None of us
is going to sleep, but for now,
we’re silent. Windows rolled down, chlorine
drifting in with the sting of money spent.
It’s all we remember: five of us lined up
on that diving board, saying our prayers.

:: Jim Daniels, Night with Drive-By Shooting Stars

A Shrine

One floor below, the fridge
stutters awake, makes its mechanical adjustment
the way I’d clear my throat; and from bed
I know it’s late, late and dark.
There’s no traffic yet on Lexington,
no low thrum of trucks idling
making deliveries on Grand, grinding trash.

But something’s disturbed the dog,
who shakes herself briskly
and circles again on her pillow.
Her tags and collar tinkle high-pitched and gentle
and would not rouse me if I weren’t
already wakeful, lying with my eyes
deceptively closed, as if my father
were back again. Checking on me.
Expecting me asleep.
Home from the paper past midnight,

he stood at my door letting his quarters
and thin dimes in his pocket
shift through his fingers, jingling,
his presence and the early hour
mildly announced. And though I’d watched
and waited, I hid myself
unbreathing in my child body
to keep him there, to savor
that fragile music.

:: Janet Holmes, Humanophone (2001)

A Chance

A girl drops my composition class.
She tells me in a note
she won’t be back.
She’s not ready for this class.
I gave her a no credit on her first assignment.
It suffered from fundamental errors.
After class, she told me she’d worked harder
on this paper
than she’s ever worked before.
She told me her friends had told her
the paper was fine.
Even her mother had told her it was good.
“But you say it isn’t,” she said.

I’m seventeen when my family has to move.
We’ve got eight kids, so
the walls need repair.
My dad and I stay behind to do it.
He hands me a spackle knife
And a wad of newspaper.
He says, “Use the newspaper to fill the holes.
Then butter on the spackle.
Not too much:
You’ll have to sand it
when it dries.
After you sand we’ll paint.”
He goes upstairs
To start on the bathroom.

I stand in the hall
holding the knife and the newspaper.
A grudge fills me:
Why do I have to do this?
What good can it do me?
When my dad comes back downstairs
and sees that I haven’t started,
he picks up the knife and the spackle.
He screws some newspaper into a hole.
He pastes on some spackle.
He faces me, the knife and spackle in his hands.
“Okay,” he says, offering me a chance.
“Now you.”

:: Marc Petersen, This Is My Brother Talking (1998)

Saying Goodbye to the Old Airport

Greater Pittsburgh International Airport
looks like it was built by Mussolini:
giant bronze eagle over the entry,
fat black marble columns squatting
like the entrance to Hell. I’ll miss it,
old terminal of the steel petit bourgeois.
I hear it’s going to be converted
to food boutiques: boutique bakeries,
boutique souperamas, perhaps boutique meatshops
selling gutted rabbits, like empty pink purses
magically transformed into Lapin Provence
so the provincials will have something
to write reviews about, though I miss
the ugly places with blood on them
that tell us where we came from, what was done
to our grandparents, and our rude uncles who wore
handlebar moustaches and swore at the bosses.
My grandmother scrubbed floors her whole life
and her finest possession was a chip of diamond
on a wire ring. She’d be amazed at this place,
how town after town there’s mo failure visible,
gleaming miles of steel and glass so that
only if you search for the hidden places,
the towns in valleys we don’t visit, the shacks
in the shadows of the rusting mills, like medieval
lackeys around their fallen lord, do you find
the fat mutti sitting in her broken chair,
the grange halls, windowframes peeling and the glass
loose, where the poor danced.
I used to tell visitors how
the great magnate Frink on his deathbed
said “tell Mr. Carnegie I’ll see him in hell”
and surely he has, if there is a hell beyond the Ohio.
Or maybe there isn’t, or maybe the sleepwalkers
in the malls are what we know of it, deracinated,
deodorized, in their eternal artificial spring.
The last joke of history on those who don’t know it
is that it writes us. In all the great malls
sad, desperate or blank faces, as though
the Pinkertons were coming up river again
with their guns, as though history were repeating
itself, as Groucho said, but this time as farce.

I used to laugh with visitors at this hideous
terminal, its fascist flag bank flapping and flapping
but I always said, “somehow it grows on you” and later
getting out of the car at the place where I work, I’d say
“before the university paved this space over
for parking there was a cemetery here.”
But of course the authorities didn’t remove the remains,
just smoothed asphalt over what after all
were nameless immigrant graves. Painted straight
white lines. Put up signs. Stuck meters,
starved wingless angels, all over it.

:: Ed Ochester, Allegheny (1995)

Entrepreneur

It’s no crime to take things,
like life, a little at a time.
At Brown Shoe Company he stitches
leather on the big machines, careful
not to sink the needle into his own hide.

There is no choice but work,
no luck but money:
a good boot, strong sole
brings ten dollars on the street.
At lunchtime, on five-minute breaks

he lets them fly
out of windows, land by the factory wall
where he finds them later
walking home.
He names greed the thief:

someone else’s stealing seventeen cases
puts guards at stockroom doors,
alarms on walls, throws
his modest business
off for weeks.

:: Mary Fell, The Persistence of Memory (1984)

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

:: Robert Hayden, Angle of Ascent: New & Collected Poems