Club
116 f r o m c l u b : g r a n d d a u g h t e r p o e m s c l u b Some Monday nights we meet after supper, no moms or dads allowed, I’m grandfathered in. The only organization I’m part of—no nation, no religion, no academic business anymore. We do science experiments like walking around the block to check on Hale-Bopp. She wears special shoes, genie silk numbers that turn up at the toe. She invents people that live in houses we pass. Teacher Jane with lights on her arbor. She has funny hair. Green. Uh-oh, here comes a broken Milk of Magnesia bottle. It’s the blue swamp. I’ll carry you across. One night we met at the new house they’ll soon be moving to. She takes me upstairs to show which room will be hers, empty except for a metal office desk. Students have been renting the house. She opens a side drawer and tears off a piece from an adding machine roll. This is your permanent ticket to club. I never had a permanent ticket before. I put it in my pocket and later while we’re drawing pictures notice that it has monkishly careful writing on it. Tiny calligraphy, amazingly, of the first three and a half poems from Rumi’s Birdsong. Somebody copied out the entire book on that roll. I do not pretend to know what’s going on, but I was there re-membered into a body, a flock, when Briny reached in like a little bird and handed me my permanently torn ticket stub to club. ...
OR
