Room Service: Poems, Meditations, Outcries & Remarks

What I did not teach you about poetry

43 What I did not teach you about poetry could be placed in a cardboard box, wrapped in brown paper, tied with fibered twine, and sent through the mails to meet you at home when you arrive. Your mother would say, as you enter that house with your suitcase of dirty laundry and great books, Here’s a package for you, and she would pour a glass of whitecold milk. sit down, she’ll say placing cooking on a plate with a wavy blue line around the edge, the one you forgot about, the one you remember. That plate, I remember that plate. and you will set down your suitcase, a yellow sleeve caught in the side, you will set your tennis racquet and satchel on a green wooden chair, you will sit at the table, and the table will rise in your mind like an artifact, you will remember the wood under your fingers. This table, I remember this, and as you set the glass on the table in that minute your mother will say, Tell me all about it. Your father would be settling the car in the garage you barely remember, dark as a dream full of lawn mowers, oil on cement, snow tires. now your mother, in a dress that is coming back to you now, a yellow summer dress with vague green fish swimming around her, opens the cupboard which makes the unique noise of wood, a soft click, I remember that sound. The water will boil then, whistling in the light, but your only mother has decided to have iced tea instead and stirs a glass, the way she does, saying, Tell me all about it. Your father will come in the screen door, a door older than you are, these doors, you will think, are too much; I remember them, the pennytaste of screen on your tongue. Your father will be the man in his yard clothes. The graduate should have a beer, he will say, selecting one from the fridge, but you forgot and already drank the milk; your stomach is white. strange, you don’t drink milk. no, it’s all right. This is fine. Your father will be moving now; he will smell of sun and grass clippings, the corners of his forehead will be copper. His feet will leave tracks on the floor, and if you look down, you will Remember the freckled beige tiles, your cheek against the cool kitchen floor on summer days. Your mother will be up again swimming in the room, Want a sandwich? You will not have eaten many of the cookies yet. 44 no, I’m fine. Your father will be the man who does not sit down. Tell us all about it. What you will need then as the sunlight delivers every window in the room, every remembered fragment and artifact of yourself, what you will need in the disturbing promise of graduation afternoon is a sister to enter the kitchen. she will be happy for all the wrong reasons it will seem to you: happy the refrigerator is laden with soda and beer and colorful food, happy that school is out, and that the house smells like one of the larger cookies in the world. actually, she will be happy, this sister you remember only the shadow of, because you are home smelling of tobacco, home from a place, a school where she’s never even eaten lunch, a terminal where people say hello and get into cars or goodbye and step out of them. she will be happy that the room is full of people she knows. Your sister will eat the cookies. Your mother will sit down a minute, just to sip her clinking tea in your presence, and act which for her is enough, you are home, and then she will be up again washing dishes that are clean, rinsing the plate. They were good, Mom. Your father will be ready to be outdoors now; he will go through the silverware drawer looking for an old knife for weeding the lawn. do I need to say you will remember the sound of the spoons and knives being jostled, the sound of the entire drawer as it jumps to a close? as you mother turns from the sink, her hands, your favorite hands in the room, in all of history, still wet, you will wish you knew what to say, some educated perfect thing. You will wish there were...