Two Word Poems

 

Calling Me In

My mother's job was to call, standing just inside
the screen door, searching the street for some sign of me,
yet knowing the sound of her voice would stun me,
grab me as I crouched in the neck of the tree, setting sun
splat on my back, flesh thick with leaves and bark.

Those days we played games that never ended, ran
barefoot and radiant over carefully mowed summer
lawns, strained to catch wildly thrown balls, tossed
stones in chalked squares, listened to insistent insect
vocabulary explaining how time moved like the tide,

slipping up the estuary of our youth, mixing fresh
and salt days, times when heat-shimmer of tar burned
our soles, when rain made us crouch beside our bed
arguing over monopoly, eyes sliding to the window
to the dark brown of can't-go-out-yet. My mother

could never pull free of those moments, any more
than me. The little things vexed her— pants stained
at the knees, spilled cereal, children who came late
to dinner. Now those days are nothing but dry scat,
hardened tracks. I have no mother to call me in.

 

Maybe My Father

On the city streets in the sub-atomic glamor
of post-war shuffle, he might have held
my mother's hand, already his wife, already
smart in shined and polished shoes.

Maybe my father understood when the radiant
season of the fifties pulled up in a shiny new Chevy
that he just had to have everything—clipped lawn,
painted shutters, maroon robe, leather slippers.

Maybe he wasn't as vexed as he seemed
by my chalk drawings on the newly laid concrete,
my socks flung in the corner of my room, empty
soda glass unwashed on the counter.

Maybe when he came home from work his mind
just walked over everything in his way, pounding in
every nail that stuck out, smoothing it over,
drinking in the neighbor's grass, his own—measuring,

measuring. He wasn't the Marlboro man, always
smoked Camels, muscles built from lifting fifty pound
bags of flour again, again, dumping them—splat!—
into the mixing machine. Maybe he wanted

a life for me like on TV. Dresses, dates, cars
with shiny hoods. Not a girl with feet pulled up
in a chair, blanket over her, reading a book.
Maybe all those promises the world gave him

made him stiff, took away the bawdy jokes,
roadhouse coffee, bar stools, rode him like a salmon
into an estuary of sorrow, because he never
finished high school, only eighth grade where

he stood on the rooftop of his apartment building
in a too-tight suit clutching the diploma in his hands.
Maybe I shouldn't have complained so much,
shouldn't have bought the bikini bathing suit,

dated the Black boy, turned the heat up to eighty
and danced on the glass-topped coffee table,
knocked over the bronze fruit bowl. Maybe
I could have thought of something to say to him,

something about pride or love. But it wasn't just
the robe and slippers. He kept his pajamas buttoned
to the neck, his mouth stitched closed. Even at cards,
he scowled at me, said I cheated when I won.