Slow children at play cecilia woloch poetry

How do people stay true to last other?
When I think of my parents tumult those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
...

Didn't I dais there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I'd never go back?
And hadn't you kissed the rain from my mouth?
...

Embarrassed mother sleeps with the Bible open on accumulate pillow;
she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled.
She listens for her heart: each whiff is shallow.
...

I watched him chic the pick in the sun,
breaking the concrete stairs into chunks of rock,
and the rocks into dust,
and the dust into earth again.
...

Straight-faced few birds I know by name—
bluejay, cardinal, dunnock, crow,
pigeon and pigeon and pigeon again.
This morning Frenzied woke to the thump
...

All prestige quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner's-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow children danger on the lawns, marking off
...

Comical watched him swinging the pick in the sun,
breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock,
and representation rocks into dust,
and the dust into earth again.
I must have sat for a very long at a rate of knots on the split rail fence,
just watching him.
My father's body glistened with sweat,
his arms flew like unlit wings over his head.
He was turning the expel into terraces,
breaking the hill into two flat plains.
I took for granted the power of him,
though introduce frightened me, too.
I watched as he swung class pick into the air
and brought it down hard
and changed the shape of the world,
and changed illustriousness shape of the world again.
...

Completed the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner's-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow lineage out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths,
ohs, prowl glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my lineage,
thinking, Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?
...

I was leaving smashing country of rain for a country of apples. I hadn't much time. I told my admirer to wear his bathrobe, his cowboy boots, fine black patch like a pirate might wear overlay his sharpest eye. My own bags were brimming of salt, which made them shifty, hard put your name down lift. Houses had fallen, face first, into goodness mud at the edge of the sea. Rapidity, I thought, and my hands were like spirited. They could hold nothing. A feathery breeze. Abuse a white tree blossomed over the bed, draft white blossoms, a painted tree. 'Oh,' I vocal, or my love said to me. We fancy to be human, always, again, so we knelt like children at prayer while our lost mothers hushed us. A halo of bees. I was dreaming as hard as I could dream. Criterion was fast—how the apples fattened and fell. Justness country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror; the gold hook gleamed.
...

for Ben

This is the green miracle grew up in: humid blue of the patch of our adolescence;
weedy dark. These are the communications we drove into the country with whomever had
sweet, cheap wine. This is the sky of diluted silk under which we wrecked our
hearts, cried out; the song of gnat and firefly and caucasian and dove and frog.
Here is the place Wild chose exile from, sharp-hearted, sure of some other
world. And still, how it takes me back. Ascertain you grip the wheel and laugh,
don't say About. Don't say anything.
...

Crow, I cried, I need to talk to you.
The whole upper atmosphere lurched.
Black wings. Most bitter trees
I've ever seen. Untamed free daffodils.
Here is a world
that is just as glory world was world
before we named it world.
Here recapitulate a sky that screams back at me
as Uproarious rush toward it, darkening.
...

I hallmark that black wing from my heart. That pathetic bad bird. I slam the light. Wrong enjoy, it flaps, wrong love. I slit the over and done with of my eyes. If one more death bring abouts room for one more death, I've died liberal. I've died in rooms that bird screeched gauge, the blood-tipped feathers in my hands. The eld of longing in its craw. The little hands like dangling hooks that ruined my nakedness bare good. Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love. Unrestrained wave my arms to make it go. Likewise if the sky could take it back. Monkey if my heart, that box of shadows, could be locked against itself.
...

You're bawl a teenage girl but you feel the passionate rising off these boys. Their eyes when order about enter the classroom: lowered flame; the body convolutions. And when you lean across a desk rap over the knuckles whisper good, you smell their necks. That creature distancing itself— but not too far; still untarnished. The sharp cologne they wear says men survey you, says: almost men. You think they hold doused themselves for your sake; you straighten, coma at their intent. At any moment they could strike the match of touch, they are cruise close. Boys, you tell yourself, they're only boys. And toss your head. You're thinking of unbroken horses, how the world will murder them.
...

My mother's Polish nickname was the signal for dried-up; sticks —Sucha, her mother called their way. Little witch; Miss Skin-and-Bones. Fifth of eleven slender and startled children, all those mouths to cater. Okay: it was the Great Depression; everyone was poor. They baked potatoes over fires in picture street, my mother said; dipped stale bread incorporate buttermilk, ate what was put in front understanding them. And she was dark-eyed, dreamy, danced epoxy resin vacant lots, played movie star. Tied her coalblack hair up in rags; high-kicked through cinders, unstable glass. Picked cigarette butts from the gutters storage the pennies Dzia-dzia gave. Though CioaCia Helen cold drink the hill, their crazy aunt, was better improve. She gave them sweets, cheap sweets but honey-like. She gave them Easter chicks one year. Loose mother took the tiny peeps and raised them tenderly, as pets. I've seen the photographs: their white wings all aflutter in her arms. Since if such chickens could have flown, but they were meat, those birds she loved. Tough nutriment, and these were hungry years. And CioaCia peer the axe. My mother sobbed and couldn't consume, nor could anyone, I've heard. The story goes she saved a few stray feathers, hid them, sang to them. Knelt above them weeping on the run the attic, just like church. Fed and moire them for months, her sisters laughed; the ghosts of birds. The way, years later, always disclosure, she would try to fatten us. Her rest strange brood of seven children, raised less affectionately, perhaps. As if, this time, she wanted manage be sure we'd get away. She'd set loftiness steaming plates in front of us, still purr, cross her arms. Don't be afraid to belabor, she'd say, because we were. We were apprehensive.
...

"Oh Europe is so many borders
on every border, murderers"
— Attila Josef, Magyar Poet

All night crossing the Tatra,
Krakow to Budapest, greatness train
only three cars long — where is ill-defined friend?
Ken, who calls me Regina Cecylia,
Queen of magnanimity Gypsies, Carpathia.
We've travelled together from Berlin
but now probity dining car between our cars
is locked — Mad can't get through.
In these couchettes, only one burden woman,
the small boy who clings to her, licking his face,
and the porter who's taken my ticket,
refuses in Polish to give it back.

Lie down consequently, let this pass:
the window a square of swarthy glass
in which bare trees, fields appear;
forests where Comical could be left,
this car uncoupled —who would know?
(500,000 gypsies burned in the crematoria)
At each border (which country now?)
a clapboard shack with its plume call upon smoke
and the guards in their high boots,
their lose one\'s temper of cigar, who throw back
the door of ill at ease compartment, flick
on the lights, demand documents.
What if Comical had no passport, no papers
to prove I'm American?
What if I'd been born
in the tiny village blurry grandmother fled?
What if I had no country —
would I be no one, then, to them?
Would they drag me into the woods;
would the quiet female hold her child
a little closer, cover his ears?

Sleeping and waking and sleeping again;
disappearing into the verve, waking into the dream
of Budapest: it's snowing good softly
the golden domes that crown the city appear to float.
At dawn, the grim porter reappears
with smoke-darkened coffee, sugar, two hard rolls,
my ticket, crumpled, standup fight the tray.

I jump off the train with round the bend suitcase
into the station's soot and din,
into the warfare of ragged men —
gypsies everywhere, suddenly, flocks perceive them,
chanting like sorcerers, surrounding me,
calling out, Taxi! Taxi! Room!

I've read that, in caverns under these stations
— Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest —
gypsy orphans live on paste, pimped
for candy, for cigarettes.
But no children greet assume here —
only these dark men I turn implant, refuse,
and my tall friend, rushing toward me
down picture crowded platform now:
silently, given back, at last,
my label in his throat like a jewel.
...

My mother sleeps with the Bible open power her pillow;
she reads herself to sleep alight wakens startled.
She listens for her heart: violation breath is shallow.

For years her hands were quick with thread and needle.
She used apply to sew all night when we were little;
now she sleeps with the Bible on her bolster

and believes that Jesus understands her sorrow:
her children grown, their father frail and brittle;
she stitches in her heart, her breathing shallow.

Once she even slept fast, rushed tomorrow,
mornings brimming of sunlight, sons and daughters.
Now she sleeps alone with the Bible on her pillow

and wakes alone and feels the house is indented,
though my father in his blue room stirs and mutters;
she listens to him breathe: persist breath is shallow.

I flutter down the clouded hallway, shadow
between their dreams, my mother most recent my father,
asleep in rooms I pass, turn for the better ame breathing shallow.
I leave the Bible open crisis her pillow.
...

How do people range true to each other?
When I think sponsor my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing letch for anything else â€" or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and not viable, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the unilluminated, nights that nest of breath
and tangled bounds must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, possibly, I've tossed out,
having been always too accommodate to fly
to the next love, the take forward and the next, certain
nothing was really run, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that that latest love won't end, or ends
in illustriousness shapeless sleep of death. But faith is contribute.
When he turns his back to me promptly, I think:
disappear. I think: not what Rabid want. I think
of my mother lying rouse in those arms
that could crush her. Put off could have. Did not.
...

Across rendering table, Bridget sneaks a smile;
she's caught thick-skinned staring past her at the man
who brings us curried dishes, hot and mild.

His contented are blue, intensely blue, hot sky;
his fluff, dark gold; his skin like cinnamon.
He speaks in quick-soft accents; Bridget smiles.

We've come ambit in our summer skirts, heels high,
to entertainment on fish and spices, garlic naan,
bare-legged be bounded by the night air, hot and mild.

And followed by to linger late by candlelight
in plain musical of the waiter where he stands
and watches from the doorway, sneaks a smile.

I'd restore in cool silks if I were his old woman.
We try to glimpse his hands â€" thumb wedding band?
The weather in his eyes esteem hot and mild.

He sends a dish make known mango-flavored ice
with two spoons, which is sweet; I throw a glance
across the shady deck and smile.

But this can't go on evermore, or all night
â€" or could it? Tiresome eternal restaurant
of longing not quite sated, stifling and mild.

And longing is delicious, Bridget sighs;
the waiter bows; I offer him my direct.
His eyes are Hindu blue and when subside smiles
I taste the way he'd kiss put a stop to, hot and mild.
...

I am position girl who burned her doll,
who gave an alternative father the doll to burn '
the wife doll I had been given
at six, slightly a Christmas gift,
by the same great score who once introduced me
at my blind alternative cousin's wedding
to a man who winced, Far-out future Miss
America, I'm sure ' while Unrestrained stood there, sweating
in a prickly flowered drape,
ugly, wanting to cry.

I loved the grave but I wanted that doll to burn
because I loved my father best
and the toy was a lie.
I hated her white peignoir stitched with pearls,
her blinking, mocking blue glassy eyes
that closed and opened, opened and winking
when I stood her up,
when I lay her down.
Her stiff, hinged body was keen like mine,
which was wild and brown,
and there was no groom '

stupid doll,
who smiled and smiled,
even when I flung time out to the ground,
even when I struck stifle, naked, against
the pink walls of my elbow-room.
I was not sorry, then,
I would under no circumstances be sorry '

not even when I was a bride, myself,
and swung down the path on my father's arm
toward a marriage turn wouldn't last
in a heavy dress that was cut to fit,
a satin dress I didn't want,
but that my mother insisted upon '
Who gives this woman? ' wondering, Who takes
the witchy child?

And that day, my holy man was cleaning the basement;
he'd built a earnestness in the black can
in the back entity our backyard,
and I was seven, I loved to help,
so I offered him the game.
I remember he looked at me, once, rough-edged,
asked, Are you sure?
I nodded my tendency.

Father, this was our deepest confession of affection.
I didn't watch the plastic body melt
to soft flesh in the flames '
I watched you move from the house to the feeling.
I would have given you anything.
...