Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems

To Prove that We Existed Before You Were Born

53 To Prove that We Existed Before You Were Born, we’ll tell you how your mom worked at the hospital, treating people like the tattered, gray-faced man who shoves his shopping cart down Verdugo, muttering to the czar. How, between bouts at my desk, I’d bumble barefoot through the house, feeding our fish, or patting Marvin, the cat. Mom will tell how, at her first job, age sixteen, she found a dead mouse in Baskin-Robbins‘ hot fudge, called the manager at home, and when he didn’t believe her, dropped the chocolate-covered Mickey on his big desk blotter, and never returned. I’ll resurrect my sunburst Stratocaster from its coffincase , and show how I played at The Catacombs, and clubbed a Bandido who rushed the stage. I might even tell how, my red pickup sagging with band gear, I’d pull away from girlfriends in Portland, Billings, Coeur d’Alene, and barely see the road for tears until, in a few miles, the clouds lifted, a surge of freedom picked me up, and, surfing on its crest, I’d start to sing. You’ll smile as if you’re hearing Jack the Giant-Killer and Snow White—as if our lives are fairy tales from olden days. Your world will be about your friends, your baseball, your Tickle Me Elmo, or whatever the fad is. You won’t care that the musk of narcissus on a March day made us feel sexy, 54 just as it will you. You’d never guess that, when you were a neural tube, an ember trying to make a flame, your mom felt sick, so we went walking on the street we were leaving to find a better place for you. A north wind gnawed our lips, but as we walked, holding hands inside my parka pocket, your mom’s nausea lifted, as did my grief to feel you stealing her from me. Inventing songs about our turtles—Mr. Cow, Peg Webb, Trout-Boy, and Tammy Faye— we started laughing, and stopped on the sidewalk (cracked by the last earthquake), and kissed as long and desperately as if we were saying goodbye— kissed the way our parents may have (since we’re both eldest children)—kissed as if we didn’t need you, one last time. ...