Summer Black and Blues

(c) 2009

I liked to sit in the weedy, tiered rockery next door.
Sometimes Steve would pretend picnic with me
but usually he and Allan played war and I read
using one hand to block sun’s glare,
the popsicle melting in my mouth as much as possible
so I could turn sticky pages with the nearly free hand.

The north rockery was fenced in and crowded
with long-needled pines, fiddlehead ferns uncoiling
childish fingers like unanswered prayers,
dank loose dirt and dark, though spring’s pussy willows
nearly made walking past forgivable.
Our rockery to the south rumored heather, roses
and hydrangeas underneath years of neglect and ivy
choking even the rocks. And so I sat
in Steve and Allan’s yard on the middle tier,
where even someone standing on their deck or mine
couldn’t see me listening to bees drone and reading.

Their father, an army or navy man,
more often gone than home;
that summer afternoon he rocked alone on his deck,
his whole body engulfing an old guitar
like the capital letter C, or a binder clip.
He sang for all I know about love or peace,
because in my memories all songs were love songs,
and there was nothing else I wanted so much as peace.

When I moved up from the rockery to the step three down
he stayed curled into his song, as mesmerized as I.
I was invisible and far too young to feel in the pit of my body
still this was as close to perfect as perfect would ever be.
Even now I’d be sitting there if my father hadn’t
slammed open the door, yelled
godddam girl, git yer ass home, slapping
the back of my head for bothering the neighbors.

Men hit. That’s what they did.
Mother’s were far to cruel to hit,
and so Didi, like Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Rose
warning their kids to wait until your father comes home,
saved up every punishment, every reprimand,
and once when their father finally had leave to come home
his anger boiled out into the yard for all the neighbors to see.

Instead of a belt or a thin branch cut from rockery bushes
he wielded a blunt two-by-four, chasing Allan
who in that moment was possibly the fastest
first-grade runner I’d ever seen, face wet and red,
screams loud and long enough to follow me for decades.

I wanted my useless father to wedge himself like a boulder
in-between Allan and his father, wanted Didi to pull enough
out of her limited English vocabulary, wanted somehow
the nerve to do anything besides cowering in the rockery,
smothering my face with my own hands, unable to turn away.