WEBVTT

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So there's a kind
of poem that I like

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a great deal in
other people's work,

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and I've been
trying to figure out

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how to do it, and do it well.

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It's a kind of
character portrait.

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But it maneuvers around
the life of the character,

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in sort of, 3D.

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It's a 3D poem.

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OK.

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It has a kind of strange
kind of globalizing effect.

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It maneuvers really quickly
and through space and time.

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And this one's a
little chronological,

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I think, in its organization
of this portrait of this woman,

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who's a friend actually.

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I was also thinking about the
concept of childhood, you know,

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and how when you're a kid,
you don't think of childhood

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as an actual state
of being, and then

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how that actually might be
a very accurate perception,

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and everything that we
think about childhood

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might be wrong because it
is a conceptualization.

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"What we call a childhood."

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"What we call childhood isn't
what a child would call it.

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So she doesn't speak of how
she was the most sensitive girl

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in the convent
school kindergarten,

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or that the God who was a
panhandler wore a fly's face,

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and that whenever he dawdled
beneath the striped awning

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of the shop selling
cut-rate shoes,

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and her class had to walk by
him as it happened on the way

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to the public library.

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She would cling to
her teacher then

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and cry, steered off by
the old nun's fingers,

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she doesn't mention why
her bedspread changed

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to blue each July, the sky
lighter blue, the screen door

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green, her stepfather's
beach house

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having been rehabbed under the
influence of sea light, sea

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light and contractor kickbacks.

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She doesn't say she was
a girl by the first week

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of sixth grade
summer vacation, well

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known as a primitive
freelancer whenever

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she rode her old three speed
English racer hand-less

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downhill to the Anchorage.

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None of it gets talked about,
certainly not the angora

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sweater and the
Chinatown bracelets,

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or those evenings
three winters later

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when she danced in front
of her bedroom mirror

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with headphones on and always
inside of the sight lines

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because she was
wearing blue bracelets,

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and somehow, that had
given her the idea

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to break into the empty summer
cottages with her Rust Belt

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boyfriend.

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She doesn't even say she
liked how her legs got long

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in a kick pleat skirt, but
hated her dark hair for curling

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if it threatened rain.

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And likewise, her
whole childhood,

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she doesn't talk about it.

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So it's all kept
in play, and no one

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will ever feel free to
tell her what it was worth,

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not even on that autumn
moor, where against all odds,

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a narrow, sandy road
gleams at midnight."

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