Revision with Playground and Seizure, and: Pastoral

Revision with Playground and Seizure

We were in the shared space of hello,the shared persuasive space of goodbye.The vaulted windows of the kindergartenoverlooked the playground, each childcopying it on their own clean sheetof paper, drawing a scribbled-up tree.I was holding the baby. I was alwaysholding the baby. In the trees outsidethe sunlight pelted some birds.My son hid behind my legs.In the first draft of the day,there is time, which belongs to everyone.There's a sergeant sun in the skybossing the minutes. My son climbsinto my bed in the morning,complaining of a sore throat.One of his cats is dead, but he stillhas the other one. He's hada tummy ache all weekend.In the second draft, the poweris still on and I'm makingbreakfast for both kids, the babysinging Ma ma ma in her highchair,smearing milk from her sippy cupinto her hair. In the third drafta beeping alarm shouts Get up! Get up!We are here on the playground,my husband running to my daughter as she knocks herself over with a swing.The sun has come to give us flowers.The flowers turn into a river, a gustof wind carrying the autumn chill,the pulsing nerve in the center of my brainthat once, when I was a child, flippedand flipped as I convulsed on the floorin a sun-hot fever. And there were my parents,for once holding hands with each other,before the rushed ride to the hospital,where a doctor stuck a needle in my spineto test for meningitis, and my father heldmy arms down, and my mother criedin a chair outside the room, unable to watchthe whole thing. I remember the mystery,like today, why time stopped but didn't,the hot crackle of a list of things I'd forget,that I keep forgetting, like my father's young facestaring back at me, or the time he carriedme on his shoulders all the way over the steelbridge in the center of town, whistlinga George Thorogood song, the rush of the coldbay beneath the walkway grating, the carsspeeding by beside us. We were on our wayto see my mother, who was finishing her shiftat a diner. We must have all smiled when we united,though I can't remember that, we must have allclung together, like I do with my kids now,on the playground, like the sun clung to the skywhen I woke in a strange bed as a childand could see the sun driving time forwardthrough the hospital curtains. Even then,I knew it was trying to piece something togetherthat wouldn't work. That's the fourth draft.The cycling sun, the stranger phantom of the day.

Pastoral

Drive across America, which is always spangling.There are always wheat fields there,and horses galloping to the vanishing pointof the horizon, where a single red barnstands in silhouette against the midday sky.There's a smell of lemon in the air,and you're already pregnant, camping equipmentpiled in the trunk of your car:a two-person tent, a box of metal platesand cups enameled blue and whitelike the Milky Way, a little percolator to hangabove a fire for morning coffee.Maybe America is pregnant too.What about the dry grasslands of Oklahoma?Knocked up. What about the floodedOzark hills? Up the spout.What about Maine, big frozen thumbof New England? No way New Englandis pregnant, she's too austere, too prim,too heavily invested in being the oldestpart of America, though she's not,too full of ancient graveyards,rot-toothed smile on her bearded face.She's waiting for something,maybe a chariot of fire and ice,driven by Robert Frost himself,old and gnarled, about the only personto leave California for New Englandand like it. There, he's putting...