Poetry

I nurse my son in bed, show my daughter to point her toe. Snuggled under a quilt they read books in the big chair and hide in a blanket fort safe in some imagined world where Tigger is the picket, guarding them from growing up. My husband's hair is wild chestnut, our skin so young I think it's fake. Smiles are in our eyes and uncertainty—like puppies beginning to understand. We wear frayed jeans, hold little hands, rescue knees buckling on roller skates, shield eyes from a blizzard. A flood breaches floors and unearths doubt like caskets in a hurricane. But all was young, once— I lift every photo with care.

Dear James Baldwin It should have been in high school that I read your claims to identity, language, truth learned in streets, in church, behind walls; that I heard you ambush negro and colored and the word I won't say. You knew why there were roaches uptown and stone lions guarding the 42nd street library. Your eyes refused to be told what they could read. Your voice declared the universe had room for you even when you felt "fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone" and asked the question— "What will happen to all that beauty?" If your question had been asked I might have known more than the angst of Holden Caulfield the disillusion of Gatsby the impulse of Romeo. Perhaps, in my senior class of 600 white and 4 black faces I might have seen beyond the cheers for David Patton's power on the football field, beyond his smile in the lunchroom. I might have felt outrage, cried out that autumn when he left for Viet Nam. And maybe I would have been more than sad and less astounded that it was his strong black body dying in a war that my white college friends and I would never know.

A tatting of pod and twig shrouds the ground, debris of vanished autumn. Orphaned leaves scatter near skeletons of columbine and peony that lean stiff in a mist of falling snow. All is still in the winter garden. Frail tendrils spiral lifeless boughs and patient conifers that await your touch. Your prints still rest on blossoms cut in August when air was ripe with lavender and rose. I see your shadow now, tending to bough and stem like a priest anointing the dead. Your incantations minister in the frost muffled by wind. I stand at the gate, heart-clenched at the lovely desolation. My hand wants to turn the lock, and walk the path toward japonica and holly. But the gray urn stands imperious and cold: ghostly sentinel turning me away.