This poem is called "Childhood."
First it was going to be called "Childhood Continued,"
but it didn't quite work out to be about that.
However, the poem has a great deal of what I call apparatus,
and I have to prepare for the poem
by describing the apparatus first.
It's dedicated to what I call the poets
of a mythical childhood, of whom I named four out of many.
Wordsworth, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, and Alberti.
And it has a little epigraph from "Bateau ivre" by Rimbaud.
Little drunken boat in its travels exclaims at one point,
I bumped up against, know you, incredible Floridas.
I happen to be from Florida, and the line
could not fail to escape my notice
and to hang around in my memory for years.
And the Floridas I thought I remembered from childhood
seemed to me incredible enough to bump up against one more
time.
And it has a sort of time and place
setting designated like a play.
Time, the '30s, place, Miami, Florida.
And then it has a long-running marginalia,
or gloss, if you remember the way
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" looks.
And that's the way the side looks in this poem.
I wanted to write a poem with such a margin for years,
and I still think I'll do it some time.
In this case, it turned out to be only notes,
but I have to read the notes, I think,
because are only two other living people who remember
the Miami of my childhood who also read,
or read poetry anyway.
And they both testified to the authenticity
of the recollections in the poem,
but you wouldn't recognize the places and the things,
I don't think, unless I read you the marginalia first.
So I'll read that first.
And then the theory that I'm operating under
is that those references will click into place
as the actual text of the poem is sounded.
So here are the marginal glosses.
In Czechoslovakia, for example, The Katzenjammer Kids, for some
years the featured comic strip of the Sunday Miami Herald.
The Olympia Theater, which was one
of those theaters with a domed ceiling in which
the stars and the moon were--
have you ever seen those beautiful things from the '20s,
usually.
And then there'd be little cherubic figures
beside the lights that were turned on between shows.
Quasi-Italian naked babies, and so on.
And [INAUDIBLE].
The hurricane season, obsolete make of car,
the Everglades on fire.
My childhood illness, osteomyelitis,
which affected my leg and the anesthesia
from the surgery connected with that.
The Capital Barbershop, M. Dupree, proprietor.
Billy's Men's Shop.
The principal east-west street, Flagler, it was called.
And Cromer-Cassell's, later Richards department store.
The shameful quote, "white" and quote,
"colored" drinking fountains of those days in that region,
against which we children reacted in our own little ways.
The five and ten cent stores, a tray of unsorted eyeglasses
and grants, at toy display in Woolworth's,
the northwest section still under development.
And some names, Sunny Isles, Golden Glades, Buena Vista,
as it was called down there, and Opa-locka, and so on.
OK, the poem.
Once more beneath my thumb, the globe turns.
And doomed republics pass in a blur of colors.
Winter mornings now my grandfather,
head bared to the mild sunshine, likes
to spread the Katzenjammers out around a white lawn chair
to catch the stray curls of citrus from his knife.
Chameleons quiver in ambush.
Wings of monarchs beat above bronze turds feasting.
And there are pilgrim ants eternally bearing
incommensurate crumbs past slippered feet.
There in the lily pond, my own face
wrinkles with a slow teasings of a stick.
The long days pass, days streaked with the colors
of the first embarrassments.
And Sundays among kin happily ignored I sit nodding,
somnolent with the risants.
Myriad tiny suns drown in the deep mahogany
polish of the chair arms.
Bunched cushions prickle through starched cotton.
Already I know the pleasure of certain solitudes.
I can look up at a ceiling so theatrical,
its stars seem more aloof than the real stars.
And pre-Depression putti blush in the soft glow of exit signs.
Often I blink, re-entering the world,
or catch surprised in a shop window
my ghostly image skimming across nude mannequins.
Drawbridges, careless of traffic,
lean there against the low clouds, early evening.
All day there is a smell of ocean longing landward.
And high on his frail ladder my father
stands hammering great storm shutters down
across the windows of the tall hotels, swaying.
Around downed wires, across broken fronds,
our Essex steers, barge-like and slow.
Westward now, the smoky rose of oblivion blooms, hangs.
And on my knee a small red sun glow, setting.
For a long time, I'd feel, coming and going
in waves, the stupid wish to cry.
I dream.
And there are colognes that mingle on the barber's hands,
swathing me in his striped cloth Saturdays downtown.
Billy the midget haberdasher stands
grinning under the winking neon goat, his sign.
And Flagler's sidewalks fill.
Slowly the wooden escalator rattles upward
towards the twin fountains of a mezzanine where boys, secretly
brave, prepare to taste the otherness trickling there,
forbidden.
And then the warm cashews in cool arcades.
Oh, counters of spectacles.
Where the bored child first scans new perspectives,
squinting through strange lenses.
And mirrors tilted offer back toy sales.
Stiffening breezes towards green shores of bays.
How thin the grass looks of the new yards.
And everywhere, the fine sand, burning
into the bare heels with which I learned to crush, going home,
the giant sand spurs of the vacant lots.
Iridescences of mosquito hawks glimmer
above brief puddles filled with skies, tropical and changeless.
And sometimes, where the city halts,
the cracked sidewalks lead to a coral archway
still spanning the entrance to some wilderness of palmetto.
Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names.