So there's a kind of poem that I like
a great deal in other people's work,
and I've been trying to figure out
how to do it, and do it well.
It's a kind of character portrait.
But it maneuvers around the life of the character,
in sort of, 3D.
It's a 3D poem.
OK.
It has a kind of strange kind of globalizing effect.
It maneuvers really quickly and through space and time.
And this one's a little chronological,
I think, in its organization of this portrait of this woman,
who's a friend actually.
I was also thinking about the concept of childhood, you know,
and how when you're a kid, you don't think of childhood
as an actual state of being, and then
how that actually might be a very accurate perception,
and everything that we think about childhood
might be wrong because it is a conceptualization.
"What we call a childhood."
"What we call childhood isn't what a child would call it.
So she doesn't speak of how she was the most sensitive girl
in the convent school kindergarten,
or that the God who was a panhandler wore a fly's face,
and that whenever he dawdled beneath the striped awning
of the shop selling cut-rate shoes,
and her class had to walk by him as it happened on the way
to the public library.
She would cling to her teacher then
and cry, steered off by the old nun's fingers,
she doesn't mention why her bedspread changed
to blue each July, the sky lighter blue, the screen door
green, her stepfather's beach house
having been rehabbed under the influence of sea light, sea
light and contractor kickbacks.
She doesn't say she was a girl by the first week
of sixth grade summer vacation, well
known as a primitive freelancer whenever
she rode her old three speed English racer hand-less
downhill to the Anchorage.
None of it gets talked about, certainly not the angora
sweater and the Chinatown bracelets,
or those evenings three winters later
when she danced in front of her bedroom mirror
with headphones on and always inside of the sight lines
because she was wearing blue bracelets,
and somehow, that had given her the idea
to break into the empty summer cottages with her Rust Belt
boyfriend.
She doesn't even say she liked how her legs got long
in a kick pleat skirt, but hated her dark hair for curling
if it threatened rain.
And likewise, her whole childhood,
she doesn't talk about it.
So it's all kept in play, and no one
will ever feel free to tell her what it was worth,
not even on that autumn moor, where against all odds,
a narrow, sandy road gleams at midnight."