Gathering Children

24 the minnesota review Alex Kuo Gathering Children for MAS 1. Each is gathered in the approaching darkness— it is a promise kept Their hair is wet from the swimming lesson and don't forget to return the library books tomorrow Silently we call them our children through the bond that separates us now / need ten dollars for gymnastics It is a way of asking to stay she is tickling me but already saying that they want to leave, whether or not we want to let go: such is the simplicity of kin 2 When we were children it was lust for clear space and how much we wanted it to be not a lie that banished us to another room Finally the interior sobs were reduced to heaving, cold air and the bare and careful silence of keeping out the world from our secret It is here that children first learned to endure and later when love began sought to tell the painful difference 3. Each is let go as we are let go by the children's trek to Utah or New Mexico in the star light that we use to map after them, bereft with rage and without geography 25kuo In the approaching darkness we keep making promises Soon the air is wet with our children Their voices are our silence, and in the clear space that we have learned to endure like the aroused desert of early memory we call after them: after we are gone they will also gather their children about and touch them with promises of their own to stay ...