If you could, follow along on the page with this next one.
Occasionally, I'll ask you if you've
got the book to read along.
You don't have to do it with every poem, of course,
if you don't want to.
This one, I would sort of prefer if you would,
if you've got the handout.
This poem is about--
as you can see from the title, It's called "The Closet,"
and then it has a little subtitle
to set the scene, "After My Mother's Death."
The speaker is a six-year-old boy whose mother has just died.
And he comes upon her newly emptied closet.
And the poem is about this.
And in the course of it, you discover,
or he re-experiences in some way, the death of the mother.
The mother died in childbirth.
And the child died also.
It's called "The Closet, After My Mother's Death."
Here, not long enough after the hospital happened.
Here, not long enough after the hospital
happened, I find her closet lying empty and stop my play,
and go in, and crane up at three black wire hangers, which
quiver, airy, released.
They appear to a joy, they appear
to enjoy their new distance, cognizance
born of the absence of anything else.
The closet has been cleaned out, full flush as surgeries,
where the hangers could be.
Amiable scalpels, though they just as well
would be themselves in basements,
glovelessly scraping uteri.
But here, pure, transfigured heavenward--
there birds whose wingspans expand by excluding me.
Their range is enlarged by loss.
They'd leave buzzards.
They'd leave buzzards measly as moths.
And the hat shelf--
the hat shelf is even higher as the sky
over a prairie, an undoubted desert
where nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret.
I've fled, had ambush, tag, age six, must I face this?
Can I have my hide and seek hole back now please?
The clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it?
Only, only the hangers are at home here.
Come heir to this rare element, fluent,
their skeletal gray sings.
Their skeletal gray sings of the ease with which they let
go the dress slip, house coat, or blouse so absolvingly.
Free they fly, trim triangular.
Augurs leapt ahead from some geometric god who soars,
stripped of flesh, it is said.
Catnip to a brat, placated by model airplane
kits kids my size lack motor skills for.
So I wind up glue-scabbed, pawing goo-goo fingernails,
glaze skins, fun to peer in as Frost-i-glass doors.
But the closet has no windows, opaque or sheer.
I must shut my eyes, shrink within to peep into this wall.
Soliciting sleep, I'll dream, mother spilled
and cold, unpillowed, the operating table
cracked to goad delivery.
Its stirrups slack, its forceps closed.
By it, I'll see mobs of obstetrical personnel
kneel, proud, congratulatory, cooing, and oohing,
and hold the dead infant up to the dead woman's face,
as if for approval.
The prompted beholding, tears, a zoom-shot kiss,
white-masked doctors and nurses, patting each other
on the back, which is how in the Old West,
a hangman, if he was good, could gauge the heft of his intended.
Awake, the hangers are sharper.
Knife and slice, I jump gropelessly to catch them,
to twist them clear, misshape them whole,
sail them across the small airspace of the closet.
I shall find room enough here by excluding myself.
By excluding myself, I'll grow.