Ditch

For a creek, I had the drainage ditchdug behind the row of streets. In it:Mtn Dew bottles half full of piss, partyballoons, tadpoles and toads, splintersof fish. Someone claimed they sawa turtle and I spent a whole week wadingagainst the current, shins slatheredwith leaves, looking, and seeing insteada snake slip across a rock like rain.If you walk along the ditch's grassy banksfrom here, it will take you back toSecond Street, then Scott Hamilton(the name a mystery to me for years),to those first places I called homein this country. One has a balcony that,when it was ours, held nothing but air.The one on Second is street level, darkand shuttered, but I know what it's like inside:nubby carpet that sandpapers bare feet,the walls damp with shower steamand nothing ever dries, this place whereI first learned to be scared of being alone,where I buried my first bird. The ditchwill take you all the way back to myelementary school, the track eight loopsof which make one mile, and the rustyhinges of the swings where, after school,no one as witness but the crows, my motherconfessed she didn't know how to swing.So if you saw us there, hurtling throughthe late fall day, gripping our chains,racing each other to the top, you wouldnever guess it was me who taught herhow to become your own engine of pushand pull, how to give your body to air.