The Fiddler of Driskill Hill: Poems

The Latchkey Child

 1. He felt within his pocket for a key That slowly through the school day’s set routine Of study, lunch, and play had settled down Below soft clicking marbles won at keeps, A worn buffalo nickel and a knife Whose ivory handle bore his father’s name Spun to a blur in games of mumblety-peg. Meanwhile the yellow school bus which had stopped Now flashed with bright red warning lights and signs Before a darkened house where no one was. The driver pulled the stick back and the doors Swung open on a place long gone to seed Since that green spring some forty years ago When mothers by their gates would wait and gaze Eagerly down the street each afternoon To welcome home missed children with a kiss, Sweet brownies, milk, questions about their day, And supper cooking slowly on the stove. Yet for a lonely boy this place was home Or all of home that he had ever known Since that cold day four Christmases ago When taking his shaken face in shaking hands His mother said things never said before Of which he could remember only one: His father would not be there anymore. The boy slid over the seat and grabbed the strap Of a heavy see-through schoolbag that had passed Hand-searches and door signs the teachers’ bells All drew him through: “NO GUNS OR DRUGS ALLOWED.” Then stepping down into the shadow-web Of January’s crackling sapless limbs He passed the gate whose iron pineapple cups Had rusted through the years of rain and snow. The house was from the '40s, cheaply sold By two who raised four happy children there But then, becoming frail, at last agreed The Latchkey Child north Louisiana, the late 1990s  To all their children’s wishes and moved in With one of them hard chosen from the rest. A lovely, warm, and lived-in atmosphere Still lingered in those rooms through which the boy Soon made his way into a lightless hall Where on a ledge an answering machine Gave out a number greater than his age. He pushed the message-button, then a click Began a long sad catalogue of sounds As messages played back from twelve to one, Voices of men his father never knew, His mother’s last, apologetic, vague. The one become a zero, he erased The disembodied presences and turned Into the empty kitchen to remove Another frozen dinner from the stack, And while it warmed inside the microwave— The processed chicken shaped like chicken legs, Thin instant mashed potatoes, greasy peas— He went alone into the family room And surfed the hundred channels on the set. Promiscuous soaps and violent cartoons Flickered by eyes looking for something else, A moralistic tale in black and white Of life within a Carolina town— Warm, humorous, humane, love’s faithful way— The mothering aunt, the sheriff, and the son. And when the loud commercials’ color came To interrupt the pleasing pastoral scenes And tiredness of the day and half a life Brought glazing eyes toward that deep healing sleep Where all is lost in symbol and desire, The boy would gaze upon a photograph Contained in an ornate Victorian frame, A woman turning toward him with a smile Out of the world of memory and dream.  2. Within his mind that place would never change From what it was before the great divorce, Those summers happy parents left him there With one both bride and widow of the land, Too old to have a care for anything Except for life remembered in a pipe Like one her great-grandmother loved to smoke Long winter nights before the Yankees came. Then rocking on the porch until the stars Appeared in constellations of their names, Like some wise angel versed in perfect rhymes She told him in the language of the heart Of things and ways of things a later age Could only dimly sense in primal signs Now taken to be less than what they seem. A virgin woodland’s clustered buttercups Scenting the fountainheads of icy springs, The baking fields of maize in dry July, Blue herons heading south through Chesnut Moons, Midwinter pansies blooming wild in snow— These were the things dumb wonder made her praise, The evident perceptions love would know. Yet from that realm where word and thing are one The boy would wake in...