POETRY KITe ANTHOLOGY

OSTRAKOI

I’m five or six. A boisterous party pulls
me half-way down the stairs, to sit peering
under the banister at Mom and Rick Larkin
face to face, arms reaching––not dancing
not talking, just floating closer––till I
catch Mother’s roving eye … she lets go,
deflecting handsome, handlebarred Rick’s
attention up at me … who takes her wet
gin kiss back up to bed, too young to know
why everything feels, suddenly, out of place.

This memory has jagged edges. Like those
clay ostrakoi Athenians attached
to unwanted newborns left out to die,
so if rescued and brought up by strangers
they might, fate willing, chance on whoever
holds the other broken half, make the match,
discover who their parents really were.

It’s six years later. Rick loses his job
(selling Iron Lungs that cures for polio
would soon make obsolete). He and I spend
rainy afternoons playing pouncing chess.
“I am an opportunist,” Rick liked to say
when he reached for my queen, not grasping
that capturing her would lose him the game.
I could see four or five chess moves ahead,
but grownups playing life were beyond me.
I didn't know what opportunist meant,
not then, till adolescence broke out
in a rash of hormonal entendres.

I’m rerunning Rick’s verbal jousts, to feel
now, each of his galloping shots to my ribs.
He once spoke up for household nudity.
“We Larkins are too pretty to be prudes,
we love walking naked around our house.”
Wow! Red-haired Ginny, his elegant wife?
Tomboy Katie? My mind slipped off their clothes,
gingerly fixed on flaming pubic hair.

Once striding from his bathroom Rick
startled a houseguest. She was shocked.
“So I said to her: ‘Do I frighten you?’”

I couldn't figure why he’d scare anyone
––such a happy-go-lucky bon vivant––
not yet seeing the stark fact he’d left out
of his account … And now, freed-up erotic
noises and images come into play…
Mother, husky-voiced at bedtime, calling Dad
to turn off the news and come up to her.

Once she pulled her nightgown over her head
so I could see for myself how different
women are from men. When at nineteen I sailed
for Europe, she kissed me goodbye, saying
“Now don’t be afraid to come home a man.”

Not till my late thirties did she confide
Susan and I had a half-sister, born
when Mom and the father were seventeen.
No one in her own family was willing
to take on Mom’s burden. Perfect strangers
had to step in. She knew the girl’s life
thereafter, only by photos and clippings.
She did her best to help me see: It’s so
hard for us––meaning girls––to say no.
Having heard a ton more nos than yeses
all through a stuttering adolescence
I was incredulous––where were those girls?
The only stunner who ever hissed yeses
my way, was Molly Bloom in Ulysses.

The morning Mother died, Dad walked me
through her roses: “It’s so unfair … Mom dying
at sixty-two.” (She wrote the book on low-
salt cooking, which kept his blood pressure down.
Dad thrived, remarried, lived to eighty-nine.)
“I was never unfaithful to your mother.
Maybe I should have been …” said a minute
later, out of the blue. I wondered why
ever would he want to be unfaithful?

I knew she’d seen psychiatrists early
in their marriage. Dad never said why.
What therapy is it that cures desire?

As a child, I knew how selfish she could be.
But she never hit or belittled me.
Except, if she thought I was being stupid
or lazy, well, that got her ire up.
More than once she told me she’d tried
to be a good mother. I told her: she was.

The day my first serious girl dropped by––
both of us home from college at the time––
all at once Mom left the house, leaving us
astonished, ourselves alone, to take as much
advantage of the moment as we dared.
If we don’t dare, we start to die: Prufrock’s
white trousers sit in judgment on us all,
whether we roll them up or take them off.

Mom did her best to raise a by-the-book
Christian gentleman. And did. But I knew
no book for the passion in her—not till
away at college, I found it in Greek myth:
Aphrodite, Helen, Phaidra––Furies
poets envision giving birth to murder,
war, tragedy … a sex still unforgiven.

Mom’s sexual dramas got no one killed.
Yet cast in one I felt it gripping me.
I was fourteen, out dripping from the shower.
She’d brought me a towel. “You’re such
a good looking boy,” she said, “it scares me.”
The potshard pieces come together. Mom
stares at me. My shivering nakedness
covers itself up. Hers lights up with a flash
so blinding all I see is the darkness.

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(originally published The Yale Review)

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