Activities

Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’ s.
My first was nursery school.
Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square and nap on army cots.
No mother questioned; no child sassed.
In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts,
we stood in line to use the open toilets
and conserved light by walking in darkness.
Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a world that would demand we fold our hands and wait.

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.
Your first love rounding a corner,
that snowy minefield.

Whether you step lightly or heavily,
you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance
before evening falls,
letting no one see you wend your way,

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,
meaning “to proceed, to journey,
to travel from one place to another,”
as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.

There is peace there of a kind,
Though not the deep peace
Of wild places. Her care
For green life has enabled
The weak things to grow.

Despite my first love,
I take sometimes her hand,
Following straight paths
Between flowers, the nostril
Clogged with their thick scent.

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.

When we finally flip it over
the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy
has had his stitches in so I can finally admit
I think it is all fantastic: the suck
of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade
bent into the guard, and the sound
of the hammer’ s head reshaping the metal.
In this our suburban Eden we’ ve only

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic —
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps — exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

At night—the light turned off, the filament
Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,
His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low
To touch a swampy source—he thought of death.
Her father's hilltop home allowed him time
To sense the nothing standing like a sheet
Of speckless glass behind his human future.
He had two comforts he could see, just two.

Old court. Old chain net hanging in frayed links from the rim,
the metal blackboard dented, darker where the ball
for over thirty years has kissed it, the blacktop buckling,
the white lines nearly worn away. Old common ground
where none of the black men warming up before the basket
will answer or even look in my direction when I ask

The gregarious dark is shifting
when she puts her second drink,
the free one, half on the coaster.
The tipped wine poised at the brim
is the beginning of the bad girl
she’ ll promise never to be again
tomorrow, who can taunt him now
to prove he doesn’ t love her
and never could: her hand slides

More than a third of a century later,
meeting for the first time in almost all those years,

we face each other’ s still somewhat familiar faces
across a table in a California restaurant,

and wonder why we did it, why we suddenly said
that night in July in Greenwich Village

“Let’ s go to Connecticut,” and got on a train
and ended up at midnight in Old Greenwich, Connecticut,

holding hands on an empty road that wound past
serious grown-up sleeping houses....