when I was a small child ecstasy was an easy thing I’d kick off my sandals the leather fraying like fringes the open buckles clacking against the slate walk run through the wet grass to the waiting swings and release them from their bondage wound around the rusty green pole and tied til summer so they would not be caught by the wind and go madly and wildly back and forth without me until the ropes tired and frayed unraveled near the top and the wooden swings with the knotted rope left in the holes flew wildly into the March wind and zigzagged through the used up fruit trees to the farmer’s field the one where we stole carrots at the end of summer and ate them where we kneeled tasting earth and abandon the songs on the radio whispered to me echoing my random thoughts that brought movement to my feet sliding across the linoleum did we have a red ceiling in the kitchen or was that later My mother and I touching shoulders at the sink she handed me the slippery plates I wiped and stacked them on the red counter edged with something silver chrome maybe she was trying to tell me something something important her eyes were wet steel her beauty laid bare but I only saw the red counter and the red ceiling and her hands that were always red the cuticles raw and splitting though she ministered to them nightly with unguents from mysterious cobalt jars that looked Egyptian while my father invented arias in the shower I thought him a great singer and wondered why he wasn’t part of the moribund panorama unfolding below the night he took me to the Met I wore my first nylons Then some months later Carnegie hall I sang in the choir he brought me a yellow rose they were becoming real to me my father sitting in the balcony my mother home with the other kids it would feel strange when we returned Union City, NJ, 2015
Hiding Out