from Paragraphs from a Day-Book

Thought thrusts up, homely as a hyacinth   

wrapped in its bulb like a root-vegetable,   

a ninth-month   

belly, where the green indelible   

pattern's inscribed into the labyrinth.   

Thrust into light, it's air's inhabitant   

with light and air as food and drink.   

A hyacinth, tumescent pink   

on the low wooden Mexican chest   

confronts the wintry dusk   

with informed self-interest.   

Leaf-spears extravagantly ask   

what idea, still gnarled up in a knot   

of ganglions, will break through the husk   

shaped at last, recognizable as thought.   

•

   

Trace, on a city map, trajectories   

of partially-forgotten words   

along the river's arteries,   

volatile substance of a sentient world.   

Mauve heather crowds the window-grill. The light   

lingers a little later, with a slight   

vernal inflection. In a moon-glazed vase   

bloom yellow freesias, like some rainy day's   

brook-bank, in someone else's memory.   

Small whirlpools of perception widen, ring   

an infant's numinous discoveries   

of syllables for animals, toys, trees:   

a Lab's thick coat, the dusty birds   

in Claremont Park each tardy urban spring,   

a stuffed pink leather horse with button eyes.   

•

   

A question-mark in yellow overalls,   

I could read. I was three.   

I slept with that pink horse. My one doll's   

name was V. J. She'd been given to me   

to celebrate the Victory   

over Japan, that is to say, the Bomb   

I'd spend my schooldays taking shelter from.   

I couldn't tie my shoes. But Reddy the fox,   

Tootle the engine who jumped off the tracks,   

spelled me their stories on my mother's lap   

despite weak eyes and poor small-motor skills.   

My grandparents were dead: not in pogroms,   

not in the camps—of strokes and heart attacks,   

merely immigrants, not deportees.   

"When you die, does everything just stop?"   

•

   

I'm four, in itchy woolen leggings,   

the day that I can't recognize the man   

down at the park entrance, waving,   

as my father. He has ten   

more years to live, that spring. Dapper and balding   

he walks toward me; then I run toward him, calling   

him, flustered by my flawed vision.   

Underfoot, the maples' green-   

winged seeds splay on mica-specked octagons.   

His round face, thin nose, moustache silvered gray   

at thirty-eight look (I think now) Hungarian.   

I like his wood-smell of two packs a day   

as he swings me up to his shoulder   

and I say, things look blurry far away   

—one Saturday, two years after the war.