Poetry in America

Years from Now When You Are Weary

42 years froM now when you are weary and worn out, wondering how you’ll pay a bill or make the rent or meet a deadline set by some thoughtless boss—and kid, such days will come—remember yourself at five: hair light from the sun or just from being young, new lunchbox pasted with butterflies, how you hung your backpack on a hook, then wouldn’t let me take your picture on the first day of school, sending me out of that classroom, to the car, to my job where a pair of bats flapped in the hallway. Bats may be just bats, but one darted into my office, quick as the boxer’s head that bobs and weaves and never gets hit. It landed and hung from the drapes, upside down, as you hung in my body for a while. Bats are not the only flying mammals. That afternoon in line for the bus, you cried, so tired you thought you’d fall asleep and miss your stop. Years from now, child, in some helpless dusk, remember that fatigue but how you made it home to me anyway in the care of a kind farmer–bus driver. Recall that once I arrived late, your bus 43 gone, and when I found you, carefully seated by a coffeepot in a corner of a dim garage at the school bus lot, you just said, Let’s go, Mama. Don’t tell anyone about this. ...