Once in an Antique Shop
What in a baby’s mind allows her to laugh
before she has what we think laughter requires,
language, outlook, irony? But here she is,
in this crammed and dusty shop,
eight weeks old, in her mother’s arms
and laughing. The land may be coming
apart, warring lawyers, legislators, landlords,
and not-so latent fascists hard at work
undermining everything we stand on.
But the baby ripples all over and laughs
as her mother changes her diaper, then
settles her gently back into her pack.
Around us an over-priced Coca Cola sign,
a nicked and gouged wooden dough bowl
somebody will pay big money for.
What the baby doesn’t know delights her,
and her delight almost reaches me
as I finger a piece of Civil War lead
that may have passed through a man’s liver
then lodged in a tree — gouged out when?
and by whom? carried in what pocket?
for how many years? — to end up here,
where this baby gurgles and stretches her limbs,
grinning up at her mother from a world
without irony, where she is not separate
from anything she sees, a world before
like and lie and loathe, and so she laughs
in her great unknowing, as though she comes
from a place she hasn’t yet forgotten, a place
where such knowing doesn’t need to exist.
* * * * *
1985
After the supercell passed through, we were
stopped at the crossing, the dog and I,
watching the train’s cow catcher stuffed
with green boughs. Uprooted trees blocked
our route home, sent us down country roads
where radio towers blink all night, warning
whatever flies: turn away, don’t soar into me,
don’t be the moth seduced by a light that kills,
by that ultimate longing to merge. And yet,
what night didn’t I drive toward light, toward
warmth, sloughing my coat at the door?
*
I could pick any year, say 1985.
What happened then? Say I jogged the cemetery,
past storm-downed trees, uprooted sycamores
and oaks, then home into welcoming arms.
Say the world wanted only calm vanilla skies,
a vanilla president, and turned away from
darker sorrows. Say in a church basement
I worked the can opener around the huge tins
of government meat, while another woman
stirred it into something edible for those
coming in from doorsteps and alleys.
*
Say there was a man in a black choir robe
with plastic spoons pinned down the front
like military medals. And a young woman
whose pupils swirled when she spoke of outer
space, as if she thought that to study the stars
you first have to burn, lose yourself in light-
years until you can’t find your way back home,
and so drift through shelters and soup kitchens
among men with the scent of booze oozing
from their skin, with deep pockets in their coats
for cradling their bottles of moth-light.
*
At the end of the night, we’d send them out
into whatever storm was brewing, while
inside it was trash, scrub bucket and mop,
then the drive home stinking of grease
and sweat, home to warm arms, bright eyes,
and children wanting a story, a shirt
ironed for the next day. Oh, in 1985
were we too busy making it all happen
to ask what it meant? Though really I knew —
it was those arms at the end of the day,
and children I could feed kisses and stories.
*
It was the men and women at soup kitchen
wanting to tell someone how they spent their day,
a whole table of old women wearing white gloves.
In 1985 we got day-old everything from various
stores and concocted edible meals, and no matter
how many men peed on my tires, I got home
to lights, the door flung open, to lingering arms,
to children, the dog wagging, and most of all
to the bed where I’d lie down beside my love,
the way he’d chuckle on the verge of sleep
as if entering a sunlit realm after rain.