Explore Poems: Infancy

Gazing at the sky, all cloud-strewn
A child wonders, Where’s my moon?

Child cries a river like a monsoon…

Hush thee and sleep, little one, 
     The feathers on thy board sway to and fro; 
The shadows reach far downward…

Marian upstairs is anxious for an update

from the extended care facility
where her husband is dying.


Four blue macaws bustle through
the airspace above the neighborhood.


Her footfalls go cursing from room to room.


Here, the toddler testifies,
“Noooo poops!”

But the toddler is lying.


I tell him...

A body must remind itself
to keep living, continually,
throughout the day.

Even at night while sleeping,
proteins, either messenger, builder,
or destroyer, keeps busy

transforming itself or other substances.
Scientists call these reactions
—to change their innate structure,
dictated by DNA—cellular frustration,

a cotton-cloud nomenclature for crusade,
combat, warfare, aid,...

its still hard to enunciate

ghosts talk how-how

not easy to master

context none

its glossary is impossible

me life complain-complain list

but i want forgiveness

mistake-mistake long-ago

im a jumble

find mouth gibberish-gibberish

even vowels have

can’t impossible

whats left are my hands

grab s-h-a-d-o-w experience

& breaking free in the sun

one day...

I am living outside of time and space as I have known it. When I walk through my neighborhood streets in early evening with my son strapped to my chest, I watch the other people going about their tasks: returning...

 

I thought a tree dying was a sign of pestilence or terror or you’d done something wrong in your life and so your tree died. But no, sometimes, like a pet, they just go. Lifespan different than a dog, how...

I was Little Albert.
Nine months old in the famous film.
In a white cotton nightie, on a lab
table sitting upright
facing a camera.
Remember me? Sure.
You do.

First, you saw that I was a “curious” baby.
You saw that I blinked and stared
with all the...

Between us bobs the baby, solemn in her infant wet suit.
The pool is the only place where
              screaming does not indicate terror.

The neighbor’s pansy beds—O to lie down in those beds
and doze. Greener than grass, says Sappho,
              originator of envy.

My...

Half blue, feet first
she battled into the world.
Hardly surviving the blood cord twice wrapped,
tense around her neck. Hanging.
Womb pressing, pushing,
pulling life from mother’s child.
Fragile flesh emerging perfect in blueness,
like the lifeline that sustained her,
yet limp, almost a corpse.
 
Her mother claims...

Even now, after all
these years, my father, 89,
still uncertain when I call
whose voice it is—Ann's or mine—
 
saying Hi, Dad, and from where,
the next town or a different state,
still pausing in that powdered air,
this little silence as he waits
 
at the nursery...

Dress like you care!
Eat like you care!
Care like you care!

You don’t think
apples just grow on trees,
do you?

•

A fish taps a clam
against a bony knob
of coral
to crack its shell — 

which demonstrates intelligence
yes, but
is the fish
pleased with itself?

•

Alone in your crib,
you form syllables.

Are...

Does my little son miss the smell
of his first mother? I wonder
as the mewl of his mouth
opens toward a plastic bottle
that is not her breast.
 
Sudden new mother,
I bury my nose deep
into his skullcap of ringlets,
his starry cheesiness.
 
In her good-bye letter...

Blue light ringing through
the green grass.

The bent heads of petals

are not praying
to anything or to anyone.

Only we are
standing in a field of them,

my son and me and me
holding him.

In my arms he stretches
out to the very far ends of the...

sister was the wolf
& could cross easily through

the mountain dark to den
keen & quivered with

the muscular siege of slit    purse
purple with hours

purse purple with birthwork
her sight both inward-

& outward-lit
on what small sparkle of pyrite

in the silt or the thick...

Say licked clean at birth. Say
  weeping in the tall grass, where
    this tantalizing song begins,
  birds perched on a crooked branch
over a grave of an unending trek
  into the valley of cooling waters.
    The soil’s thirst, lessons...

My daddy understood
the richness of color and
shunned my oldest sister’s
whitewashed birth.
Who the white child belong to?
He asked in the delivery ward
shaming himself as the source.

Shadism colored my siblings’ perception.
An ideal hierarchy with light skin the pinnacle
after the paper bag test...

it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother
weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green
chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels
she too will   share in this act   of love
my own mother says...

She’s got a hundred & two temperature, delivery room nurses said. You’re
gonna live, though — long enough to know you’re going
to go as quickly as you came, gonna make your mother swear by you, going to
shake your Bible with red-tipped nails before...