Cosmos: A Poem

Learning the Directions

19 LEARNING THE DIRECTIONS That small world where my soul was inserted fell from a hill crest south, toward low-lying fields which the river flooded. The slick-roiled pulsing siphoned away time below the bridge, through the fisherman’s moccasin-haunted banks, where a plank-built boat rode chained on the nudging current. I climbed from its overflow, awakening. Houses stood along that riverward slant, where I felt people’s lives in the cells of rooms. Soon, I crossed between our two-story house and that of my grandparents. My mind mapped out where Grandfather’s garden and chicken yard lay, past the scuppernong’s swelling, pillowy tangle over the six-foot wooden fence. There I remembered how, inside his packhouse, air felt greasy with the hams and shoulders that had touched my cheeks. Then I passed the clinic where Dr. Darden had sat, fat in his castered chair, before a roll-top desk, freezing my ringworm with his silver sprayer. Alongside, a street led away into the brightness of the fields—a concave of sky over corn, where sun ignited the invisible air, at a height to behold a world below, from a steep intensity of heat. I saw, deep in the Coleys’ porch, the daybed where Miss Ada Gray had reclined to recover—it pensive still, before the too-tall curtained windows. She had rested, prone with T.B.—a shivery word for a child, sound-reminding of sanitorium, and Wilson. But that was west and north, past the ridged-up railroad tracks that divided the village’s houses 20 and churches and market and stores from the dangerous wail of the sawmill. Its shark-toothed shining circle ripped up the pine logs that smelled like Christmas. My father’s service station lay also across the tracks—where the steam locomotive had whooshed in passing, hissing with vacuum brakes, smelling of a metal world. Over these steel, parallel lines, polished by the linked wheels, the water tank tower stood giantly silver, its flashing height like a Martian fighting machine. The sun-gleam crowned its conical hat with a killing brilliance. The horror of hurtling bodies of silver and olive drab, diving and bombing, in radio static, and flickering in movie newsreels, swirled still in air, around these great Martian legs, that suspended the tank like the Tallboy bomb I’d read of. It seemed continually to be falling, when I looked straight up: sighted-in by crosshairs, exactly where Main Street intersected the railroad. There, trains hauled change on past us, the long flatcars hurtling along at dusk, bearing khaki trucks with white stars on doors, the tanks with their molded-steel, menacingly rounded, hard-headed turrets and projecting guns jolting on quickly before me and my father, our breath sucked out by that war-velocity, while I felt his blunt wounded fingers that kept him to fight on the home front. The plate glass behind us showed the discredited peacetime furniture, the sofas for families to loll on, lazily together. Now war-fear blew through like a black wind, sending my father back to his station after supper for a last lonely patrol, in front of his gas pumps— 21 the Esso-ovals like military insignia upon them. The bulbs around his shelter extended their light, above piled tires, in a perimeter holding back darkness. Those summers, multitudes of moths had circled the bulbs, casting their magnified shadows, flickering out onto the chinaberry trees and cabins where the cooks and sawmill workers of a darker color lived—where sometimes I had played, with the fragrant, comfortablefeeling kids, in their game-marked sandy clay. Then, with my rheumatic fever, a woe led east, and frighteningly through the sun-down fields, past barns and over bridges, of those places I’d never seen at evening, to the children’s hospital at Greenville. Its rectangle of halls, and needles afterward, towered in dreams, far beyond its six-story height in daylight. The cots of our ward reminded me of newsreel orphans in Poland. The inky tentacles, that the octopus-Axis reached out in Life magazine, had touched us likewise. My father was home but absent, Mother’s fear for my too-quick heart sending needles of chill through the yellow-lighted circle over suppers. Later, he carried me in his arms and ascended the perilous wooden stairs to the roof of his shelter, which the Civilian Spotter...