Nineteen-Seventy-Two, and: Nineteen-Thirty-Eight

Nineteen-Seventy-Two

After the expected exchanges, they brought us
baskets of oranges that smelled like heaven, yellow
chrysanthemums, huge bowls of sweet rice -
so much food and beauty and weed enough to stall

our fear of return. And after the women undressed
and kissed us and showed us what kissing could bring
in the sanctuary of those perfumed rooms
that seemed enough like homes where kings

might lounge through idle afternoons, we might lose
ourselves in the petals of chrysanthemums
and afternoon women. And later we'd make out
the sound of an American truck gunning its engine

a few blocks away, and soon American voices overtaking
the civilian street below those rooms. If only the scent
of oranges could replace the unmistakable stink of doom
dragged with us, no matter the delicacies or the money spent.

Nineteen-Thirty-Eight

I remember the way my mother
told people when they asked
where she'd gone to school,
South Side High, 1938, adding the year
to the place all in one breath
though I knew she never
graduated, interrupted by the famous
Great Depression when her father
couldn't find a job he'd take
because he wouldn't take one
that made him leave
his fancy suit in the closet,
only found what he called sweat jobs
and instead took my mother -
only months from finishing -
out of high school,
what did she need
with an education, he told her,
and she could do something useful,
didn't he put food on the damned table
all her life and all her little sister's?

When my mother said 1938
she said it with what I remember
as pride, her eyes sparkling, her mouth
in the same firm smile, her hands
busy at whatever her task was
when the questioner
questioned her in passing, just
a curiosity, a confirmation.
She may have been at one of those
officers' wives' luncheons wearing her
smart white gloves I inherited and have
no use for and a dress she made herself
that looked store-bought she was so good
with her second-hand Singer,
and one of the other women
my mother just discovered had grown up
back East in the same city would ask.

How much a lie like hers
was necessary, how she had to answer
South Side High, 1938, and smile her prideful smile
that wouldn't betray the fire
in her chest, her envy
for the questioner, these women's husbands
had courted them in college after all,
and wasn't she the lucky one,
my grandfather was fond of telling her
even into my childhood, sometimes
in front of my friends, lucky
to have got my father, a college man,
the one night he went to a ball game,
a college man who sat next to her
on the bleachers in 1939, just look at her
who didn't even finish high school,
didn't I tell you, he'd finally say, it never
didn't matter?