A child enters my room sometime after midnight.
I know it’s my son by the silhouette of his cheek,
his spiky, sleep-tossed hair.
I say his name. He doesn’t answer.
I call his name again and
again, he does not answer.
It is my boy, isn’t it?
Or have I transformed a masked stranger into a
second-grader in blue plaid flannel pajamas?

A whisper of a laugh escapes him and
it does not sound like the laughter of the boy I know.
Someone else has come upon us,
insinuated himself into our family,
eased in on a black night.
Fear slips cold gloves around my lungs and
I can’t breathe.
Motionless on the threshold, the
stranger stares at me in darkness.

Next morning at breakfast the
eight-year-old is back. His spoon lifts
in and out of a cereal bowl, flashing silver.
He sees me gazing at him in the morning sun.
He smiles his gap-toothed smile.
After a minute I smile back at him.
I don’t want to think about
what I witnessed there, in the dark:
the man inside the boy, waiting to get out.

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight
Venus and Jupiter will conjoin
in the southwestern sky,
a fist and a half above the horizon.
They won’t come together again for seventeen years.
What the article does not say is that Mercury, the
dark planet, will also be on hand.
He’ll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.
I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where
will I be?
Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,
let me propose a trade:
Auburn hair, muscles that don’t ache, and a seven-minute mile.
Here’s what I’ll give you in return:
My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for
French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and
the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.
She stands on a stool at the sink,
washing her toy dishes and
swaying to a whispered song,
her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.
The planets are coming together now.
Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.
Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red
plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here’s another offer, a real one:
Let her be.
You can have it all in return,
the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell
and the softness of Sam’s mouth on mine.
And my life. That too.
All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence
she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes
I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.

Once There Was

Once there was a childhood full of space. Long stretches of stillness. A deep sense not of loneliness but alone-ness. This was in far upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. There were three little girls, sisters who dressed up for Easter, and for the first day of school, and never else.

The oldest woke every morning to the sun slanting through pines at the far edge of the field across the road. She stood outside in the darkness before bed and looked up at the stars glittering thickly in the heavens, diamonds on black velvet. When she lay her head on her pillow her ears were drawn inward to the depth of the surrounding silence, and the shushing of her own heart was all she heard.

There was a giant maple tree at the end of the driveway. Every summer afternoon the three sisters gathered there at three o’clock, and their mother read aloud to them.

There was a dirt road that meandered down the hill and through the woods and over a wooden bridge that spanned the brook to a far meadow.

Down the dirt road there was a swamp that – if they jumped from hillock to hillock – they could cross without getting their feet wet. In the midst of the pine trees that grew on the other side was a clearing made holy by its thick carpet of pine needles, by the sunlight sifting through outstretched branches. The sisters called it their pine tree house.

There was a green insulated knapsack that their mother packed bologna sandwiches in, to take down the dirt road, across the swamp, to the pine tree house, for picnics.

There were blackberry canes down the dirt road, bending over the brook. There were green paperboard berry boxes that they carried down the dirt road to the blackberry canes. Drone of insects. Beat of sun. Burst of sweet juice on tongue. Long auburn hair caught in thorns. A curving scratch on a knee, beaded with blood.

There was a broken-down barn filled with hay. A rope swing tied to a rafter. Three little girls heaving hay bales into stacks, pushing out tunnels in those stacks, making a hidden fort. There was a flashlight and a book being read in the silence and darkness of the hay fort. A girl listened to her sisters running on the hay above her and shrieking as they swung out on the thick rope swing.

There was a tree house built by the oldest that neither of the younger two could manage to climb into. The girl took her jackknife and carved her initials into a slender branch: A. R. M.

The dirt road? Still there. The pine tree house, still there, and the broken-down barn, and the holy pines. The giant maple, gone. The scratch on the knee faded to a whispery white line. And the three sisters grown to women all, their shadow baby selves still wandering the dirt road of their childhood. The A.R.M. is fat and pillowy now, cradled in the embrace of the branch that healed around it. And the girl who carved it is sitting right now in a bagel shop thinking of Neil Young, who wrote, “All my changes were there.”

[photopress:Binkel__Alison__and_Oatie_1.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

There’s a lot of great writing out there these days. Here’s a sample:

1. I cleaned out the William Maxwell novel section at my favorite bookstore – Magers & Quinn in Uptown Minneapolis – and stacked them up on my desk. So far I’ve made my way through “So Long, See You Tomorrow” and “They Came Like Swallows.” I have to stop sometimes as I read this man’s work, it’s so painfully beautiful.

2. A new novel by a novelist named Rebecca Lee, called “The City Is a Rising Tide.” Amazing book. If I tried to describe the plot it would sound mundane, so I won’t. The magic of this book is in the writing, and in Lee’s ability to capture in one sentence emotional undercurrents that would take others entire books to describe.

3. “The Madness Equation,” by Mary Spalding, which is an essay/memoir in the September issue of The Sun Magazine. The writer draws a connection between fractals (as in math and physics, both subjects I love reading about) and  “madness.” Fascinating.

4. The Ramona books, by Beverly Cleary. Ever read these when you were little? I just read them all, one again and the rest for the first time. They’re great.