The Mother/Child Papers: With a new preface by the author

In the Autumn of My Thirty-Seventh Birthday

‹37› In the Autumn of My Thirty-Seventh Birthday Going to work on the bus —Needles strike the window, O it’s gonna be a cold rain says an old woman. * Leave dreary desk take walk on dreary campus within his bending sickle’s compass come seed pods brown hard durable I collect them and recall the pulse, desire and flight of a drift of timorous cherry blossoms outside my house an age ago, last spring: Must I go, then? Must I learn to crawl naked into the cold? * In the afternoon on the bus schoolgirls are flirting and shrieking. Their glow does not concern them but penetrates through bus walls and hurtles for miles through the wet Jersey woods as we drive past the graveyard and then past houses where they live and yelling one by one get off. * ‹38› Slick Joni Mitchell on the record player spaghetti and meatballs salad ice cream Gabriel’s laughter Rebecca’s hair Eve’s hazel eyes J’s victory at squash William Carlos Williams dancing nude nothing to me, nothing, nothing. It is right here, the hole no good thing fills. * Behind me there is an eye of a mysterious monster says Gabriel but when I turn around it hides (we riding bike up to Jack & Jill for extra sweets) and while he hugs me the pumpkins rot in the fields * 12:30 a.m. J. like a pod next to me I want to sleep, I want my healing dreams Long conversation with N. just divorced her shrink tells her to take anti-depressant pills ‹39› she doesn’t want to her shrink says she’ll be a winning horse she doesn’t want to— what does she want? to die? Gabriel howling off and on like a light bulb or a dark bulb—confused—like rushing winds, branches thwarting branches he calls, and cannot stop. I go to him. ...