Primary School, and: Spring, Again, and: Sarah

Primary School

My four children learned to read here, to talk backAnd repent in the principal's office, to unlockThe ivory puzzle-box of the multiplication tables,To utter a few lovely phrases of Japanese,To marry and give birth and die in imaginaryCovered wagons laboring from St. Louis to Sacramento.

Today my daughter read an essay to the assembly,And my youngest son played a Mozart air on his fiddle,So for the last time I visited their first school, Easterly,Namesake perhaps of the morning star, that shinesOnly a little while before and after dawn, though secretlyIt is also the evening star, and the errant planet Venus.

Fourteen years under this tangle of elm trees, lindens,Black walnuts, pin oaks that rust bronze in October,Maples that launch their bright wings downwards in April.I wrote my name on a paper badge marked "visitor,"And kept it afterwards, as if it might somehow laterRe-open the doors, sealed now by the guardian of years.

Spring, Again

Every spring, when the bright yellow, starry flutes of forsythiaSuddenly burst out from the dull monotones that are all FebruaryAnd March can muster, always the same lilting ostinato, alwaysThe same and always a surprise,

I'm back in my hometown, walking under the shadow of the overpass,Under the Main Line train tracks and the Japanese pavilion-stationWith its carved wooden dragons left over from the World's Fair onlyMy grandparents remembered,

And so now of course no one, past the haunted mansion parenthesized byWeeping beeches, where I recall the revenant who sank into an armchairBut only the chair was visible, past the Revolutionary War cemeteryWith its tilted, sunken gravestones

Carved in a lovely archaic script that no one now can decipher,Past my aunt's house that has been repainted and replanted, whereI learned all I know about classical music by listening to my unclePlay Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin,

To your house, Cinda, where you watched from the plate-glass windowWith your tennis racket and towel, ready to join me in a melodic assault onThe park court where we improvised, chasing and losing the bright tonicOf tennis ball and sharp intention, In those days when the sky was perfectly blue and throbbed in unisonWith the gold wind section of forsythia, and our limbs answered to reason,And we could run for hours without considering, stopped only finallyBy the dark scherzo of sundown.

Sarah

The best meal ever? You raise your cup of teaTo toast a thirty-year-old memory, in leaves.Remember the one-star restaurant in Cluny?The duck, the bitter greens, the floating island—Mont St. Michel awash in vanilla tides.Surprised, I disagree:I think we were merely glad to be alive.

Having survived the drama of our sonsWho loom above us now, charting the worldBy strange meridians, erratic lifelinesThat press a pattern on our late reflectionAnd faces, the trace of care,We're grateful for a holiday, a cloudless sky,Anisette cookies and a cup of tea.

Surveying the pretty table, we recallOur hot, careening entrance into ClunySo long ago, downhill: you blew a tire,And I escaped—but narrowly—a black sedanRounding a hairpin turn.We celebrated our survival with a star,And so will they one day, our wayward sons.