Little Songs
BY PETER STRECKFUS
My child, ringing in the distance, even at a distance, through the
sheer gates of mind,
I hear you. You are in the school, in the public speech of
learning, lifted from the tongues
of the whole and shared with you. It has its own sinister poetics,
the yeas and nays, the abstentions
of the body public and politic. My child, I hear you even now. As
you waste and build, speak
and hear among your peers. For what do we prepare you. How
little we are able to judge
from the ordinary habits of life. Which occur only at long
intervals.
Not at all and then at will. So the dreaded school year starts, not a
good sign, in your opinion.
Last September, the nursery teacher came to the house to talk
with us—more with us
than with you—not a good sign. But now you long for her, her
high heels and her skirts, her songs
of the ABCs. How do you fit your rhymes into those songs you
sing these days—the lower
parts veiled in fleecy clouds, conical hills, fluffy mountains, and
land-like tables—
and can we go there? On the weekend perhaps if there is time.
For now it starts in earnest,
the soft collective punishment of taking a break and of silence,
for we have learned
to judge anything but our own happinesses, and we do not mind
a little skirmish.
Three weeks ago, the Pacific wore its thin veil of smoke. You
were in its simulacrum,
a saltwater pool by the townhouses, summer afternoon repeated.
In English
“the most beautiful words.” I see you through your eyes,
their piercing catch of mind
as you master the intake of breath above its reflection—water in
the body
of your little boat, nearly five years on the earth, the pool too
deep for you to touch. For days
later, I record it, like Wharton’s repetition of James’s, transcribed
and altered, against the impossibility. Impenetrable time, I record
this here.
Meanwhile, the Ferguson Fire, and the Carr, and the Mendocino
Complex fire,
the largest on record in California, 459 thousand acres, raged in
the north.
Meanwhile, the Holy Fire, named after Holy Jim Canyon, where
it began when a man named
Forrest gave it to his neighbors, flamed over the saddled crest of
Saddle Back, on its way
through its first 18 thousand acres, visible from our pool, twelve
miles away.
And the air above Lake Elsinore rose each summer afternoon
and drew wind
from the Pacific, so the fire respired down canyon in sun, then up
at night.
The fire’s down-up-canyon movement each day named for the
lake, the Elsinore effect,
the lake itself named for Hamlet’s house on fire, for everything
may serve a lower
as well as a higher use. The surface limns and breaks across your
goggles in summer
afternoon—you break your stroke and raise your resolutely sealed
lips above it,
your lungs a sound that brings the bodies of disaster into view in
all their clear
abstraction. You come to me, you steal your breaths. In memory,
like a word. It pushes
through the air. It comes to the ear. It cries out, cut from its
mother, I am born.
At the embarcadero, we’d ridden the ferris wheel. We’d had ice
cream. We did not shop.
We didn’t have time. We played in the sand yard on the shore. A
Gulliver-sized statue
of a foot, a head, a knee, a hand, coming out of the sand. We did
not ride
the merry-go-round. We did not have time. We were leaving,
walking back to the lot.
And your sister turned to run for a fountain. She followed you
who’d just bolted for the fountain.
And I grabbed her by the arm to keep her near. To keep her
from being at the fountain,
I held her by the arm, by the hand. I turned quickly to catch her.
A kind of arrest.
I kept her. While you ran until I caught you. To catch. What is it I
want to say?
I am not gentle. It was quick—as her bolt was quick. It was
fierce, as if to say, no
never. As if to say, I catch you—have you in hand. To defeat her
flight.
Is this what a father does, as if to say, do not try to escape
again—not when
you are within my reach. As if from the sky. As if from my half
sleep. Do not wake
me in my confusion. You, keen on the souvenir in the market,
with your song
and your cloud architects rising from their tables, pouring their
structures in concrete.
I spoke to your mother tonight after we put you and your sister
to sleep.
She said she hoped I could be happy soon. She wished me to be
gentle with you.
When you cry, hurt or enraged, the philtrum, the medial cleft of
your upper lip, stretches
transformed. I feel my esophagus, like a scabbard, tighten. How
to remove
the story without depending on force. How to reach you,
standing at the door, wanting
nothing more from me in the room than the half-thought
substance of my own attention.
To be noticed. See me, Daddy. Daddy, look closely. I have a
magic trick to show you.
Anger comes so easily out of me, my author, since you died. By
the time you were old,
you seemed empty of it. You were a punisher: punitive strikes
with the belt.
I don’t want to tell my son this. I don’t know how often the welts
on my legs were there.
Were they normal to me? But I know they were not a surprise.
Seen as a sign,
that you had whipped me too hard—an apology. My mind fills
and runs, nervous,
as I try to enter this room with you. As you strayed from details
of the punishments
you suffered under your father. Daddy, watch this coin. Where
did it exit the world?
A school of koi in the shallow beneath a pier turn over one
another, churning.
One, many, have a kind of pink wound on the back, circular, as if
a sticker
from a banana, as if a coin of their flesh had been removed. You
were a punisher.
You would abide little dissent. Now I am the punisher, time as
the divisor.
Without us, in its own undulating place and time, the blaze rises
in the sky.
Its heat creates its own wind, feeding it more oxygen, violence
proceeding from it as if on command,
as if automated. Round the world, a chain of supervision, the hurt
and pain of that.
From the ridge I watch its tint, refracted through smoke in the
distance, a robin’s blood orange,
a koi’s, a dark safety cone—a train cuts through the valley, the
hills terraced with those
who can and cannot—in the veil, as if to meet the day’s first
aerial tanker
drop a sheet of retardant, it raises its volcanic head, the Holy Fire.
Time
as the divisor, your sister folds like a knife in her inflatable donut
and “teleports,”
bottom first, into the pool’s deep end. You pull through the
water your slender
hero’s body, raise your head, gasp, and thrash your nonce breast
stroke further toward me.
