FALLING
When my son fell from our roof
and lay without movement or speech,
I stared like a prisoner
through the drizzle of that evening
until he moved a leg to
release me. In the clearing east,
stars formed familiar shapes, blue
going to black near Buffalo
where schoolchildren were losing
their balance by the Love Canal.
Four times, in my preschool year
of clumsiness, I fell down flights
of stairs, ten or twelve per plunge,
wooden and cement, and each time
I sat up, then stood, and walked
to iodine and band-aids in
a house of strangers, learning,
at five, to keep quiet my pain.
My son rose into my arms,
and we talked and talked and followed
the angle of that slick roof
toward the sky's seven sisters.
Pleiades, I said, the daughters
of Atlas. My son, nearly eight
years-old, declared he wasn't
inside himself. So far away,
Buffalo's lights suggested
nothing for us but awful news.
¤ ¤ ¤
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON
Just after Elvis died, the day before
My vasectomy, someone in Somalia
Caught the last natural case of smallpox.
More than twenty years now, but we've stored, "just in case,"
Seventeen million doses of vaccine,
According to the Elvis-sighters of disease,
And this August, like always, my neighbor
Plays "Blue Moon" at sunset, spinning it forty-two
Times as tribute to the Elvis life span.
I've thanked him for not adding the posthumous years,
For not playing the King's all-day canon,
Songs so familiar I anticipate the words.
Yet still, tonight, in Bangladesh, the word
For smallpox is the same as the word for springtime,
Another version of common, but when
This man asks, "What were you doing when Elvis died?"
I say I was listening to the cries
Of my last-born son, that my wife was feeding him,
Give or take an hour. The evening's clock lies
Hidden among pictures dumped from an attic box.
My neighbor believes the past is sorted
And sleeved in a box set of the sky's thick volumes.
Concentrating, I lean back and begin
To stare, wishing his name in the collated air.
¤ ¤ ¤
THE HISTORY OF THE DIET MANIA
In Metrecal swallowed for lunch, one sip
Per minute, to fill the entire half hour.
In the celery and carrots of classmates
Rescued by needles and tubes. In bathrooms.
In the vomiting of girls who believed
Fat was ruin and left lunch behind them
In the lethargy of breakfast skippers.
In the jitters of pill takers; in fads
For profit; in advice books; in Kafka's
Story assigned by the teacher who praised
The sacred artistry of denial.
Who lived so close, his son my age, I knew
He ran his children like dogs, used the leash
Of his belt on their soft parts to free them
From the fat of sloth. Who took no sick days
From teaching. Who worshipped time clocks. Who used
The diet of coffee and cigarettes,
Stuffed himself until cancer closed his throat
And stubbed out the pointillism of pulse,
What I listened to, how I matched myself
To the published rates of the well-known fit.
In steak and spaghetti and cheeseburgers;
In secret from the starvers, my long shifts
Of running, logging my miles like the feats
Of famous fasters. Like Ann Moore, who claimed
Six foodless years, who fooled experts with milk
Wrung from her wash towels. Like Sarah Jacobs,
Who gave up water as well, renaming
The superlatives for deceit until
The hunger scholars ended that era.
In Ann Moore's confession. In the failure
Of Sarah Jacobs, who died, recanting
Nothing on the ninth day, rapt with belief
Through the quiet relinquishment of breath.
¤ ¤ ¤
WADING
In August, for one week, we camped
By a lake so shallow I could
Stand like a swimmer who comes up
Dripping a hundred feet from shore.
We'd driven six hundred miles from
Our Pittsburgh steel mill's playground pool.
The family next to us spoke French
And gave me thick bacon on bread
They sliced by knife. Movies we saw
Were in English; the Indians said
Nothing in the nearest town.
Too old to wade, my sister stayed
Inside with magazines and books
While I disappeared to my neck.
I was almost nowhere, I thought.
I ducked and rose. I backpedaled,
Took the step that ended footing.
From where I floundered, the shore was
In somebody else's story,
But that Tuesday morning I found
The small shelf with my hands, pulled up
And crawled underwater the way
I had done in a plastic pool.
And then I stood again, water
To my chin, telling myself to
Look and look for someone I knew
So the next step would be landward,
Where I had come from, the right one.
