Poem of the Week, by Veronica Patterson
It was the summer of a long pink skirt, ice cream cones, cartwheels on the beach, waitress shifts followed by late nights at the bar followed by breakfast at the diner, a little rented room and a refrigerator shared with twelve other girls. This was Cape Cod, a long time ago, and my buddies Doc and RJ and Stu would descend on weekends. After we walked back from the bar I’d hold the back door open for them and they’d sneak upstairs to my room (guests weren’t allowed) to sleep on the floor around my bed. One weekend they brought a new boy with them, someone I’d never met, and I instantly liked him. That night we all decided to sleep on the beach instead of sneaking into my room. We spread quilts and looked up at the stars, waves lapping at the shore.
The new boy and I were next to each other. RJ and Doc and Stu all fell asleep but I was too aware of the boy, and he was too aware of me. I was shy that way and he must have been too, because we lay motionless on the sand, not touching, not sleeping. Hours passed. Toward dawn I turned on my side and my foot touched his, and silently he reached out and pulled me into his arms and curled his body around mine. We fell asleep, our friends around us, and when we woke up in the morning there he was, smiling at me. The poem below brought that lovely memory washing back over me. It reminds me, in these days of justified anger and pain, how much sweetness there can be between a girl and a boy, a woman and a man.
Perseids, Later, by Veronica Patterson
A tease of clouds intermits
the searing blueblack. Cicadas
drone in a 3 a.m. silence
and I fall back
onto an Army blanket, 1956,
a meadow outside Ithaca, lying with sister
and brother, in the grip of fierce
dreams and longings, my skin
alive with up,
drawn to the studded dark, whose
tiny burns might be those of a sparkler
twirled too fast.
This night, as you sleep inside,
I lift binoculars to contain
these pricking lights, which
perforate,
and still pull me
to them. Your dream wafts from the house,
a stay. In waning heat, in my thin
nightshirt, I feel
the years accordion,
and I shiver. Each of us
gets to be vast sometime. Three
meteors streak
the length
of a star-glazed strand
of my hair. How can the birds sleep
in this confetti of light.
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Every summer in my teens I canoed with friends through the Rideau region of lakes and canals in Ontario. We camped every night, swam, cooked, laughed, told ghost stories and played games. One annual camping spot was on a lake with an enormous rope swing tied to an overhanging tree. You grabbed the rope, stepped back as far as you could, swung out over the water and then plummeted. The rope swing took nerve. The drop was steep and the water cold, and once you committed, you had to leap – if you swung back you’d crash against the tree and the rocky bluff. Leaping from it was wild and exhilarating. Once, as I swung out, I looked down to see a long water snake swirling in the water directly below me. My fear of snakes is lifelong and deep-seated, and I was horrified, but there was no going back. I plummeted with my eyes closed and struck out for shore the second I surfaced.
A few years ago my brother sent me a photo of my nephew, with the caption Getting his mind blown at Nickelodeon Universe. Nickelodeon Universe is a crowded and noisy place, but in the photo, my tiny nephew stands alone in a huge open space, his head craned up, staring at something I can’t see. The photo conveys profound stillness and concentration. Sometimes it pops up on my screensaver and I wonder again what my nephew was staring at, what was going through his mind. 
Once, a long time ago, someone close to me handed me a memo and asked me to read it. It was a work memo that summarized some unfair working conditions. I didn’t know who had written it, but my first comment was “Wow. Whoever wrote this can’t spell worth a damn and doesn’t know how to use punctuation, either.” The person who had handed me the memo didn’t hear me say this, for which I was instantly grateful, because it turned out that they had written it. This was a person I loved with all my heart. The shame I felt in that moment is something that will be with me forever. 
My youngest didn’t walk until she was 22 months old. Instinct told me she was fine so I didn’t worry about this, but I observed her with interest. One day, when I was in the kitchen and she was sitting in a patch of sun on the living room floor, her back to me, I watched in wonder as she rose –no hands, no support, no nothing– to a full stand and began to walk. I had never seen a child go from crawling to perfect walking in an instant like that. She never went back to crawling.
Neither my friend nor I had been to a high school reunion in many years –in my case, decades–and we were both nervous. The years we had spent growing up together in upstate New York seemed far away, and we hadn’t kept in touch with many classmates. So we met early, at the bar in that tiny stoplight-less town, and fortified ourselves with gin while paging through our yearbook to remind ourselves of faces and names. At one point I said to him, It’s been decades. We don’t look the same, will anyone else? 
Long ago, when I taught Mandarin at a big city high school in Minneapolis, some of my students would stay after school and talk with me. One was a Hmong young man, quiet and shy, with halting English. He would sit in the chair by my desk and cast his glance at the floor. For a long time I would inwardly urge him to look at me —look at me look at me come on look me in the eye– and then it came to me that his avoiding my direct gaze was part of his culture, and a sign of respect. All my annoyance melted away and from then on I was more soft-spoken, gentle, and slow in his presence. 
For years I’ve written 
A few days ago at the store I stood in line, my groceries on the conveyor belt: butter, greens, an avocado, carrots and peppers and potatoes. The person behind me placed their items on the belt: two packages of ice cream sandwiches. About once a year I get a craving for an ice cream sandwich, and looking at the picture on the boxes made me want one. I turned to see who was buying them. She was middle-aged, with faded hair and a worn, tired face, wearing a jacket with a broken zipper. Hunched over. She’s been through some things, was the thought in my mind, and I waited for her to look up so I could smile at her and chat a little while we waited for the cashier. But she never did look up. And I thought of this poem, by the wondrous Dorianne Laux. So many people out there, all of us maybe, who have been through some things. Oh, the water.
Alison McGhee 