IV
Not in this chamber only at my birth --
When the long hours of that mysterious night
Were over, and the morning was in sight --
I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
And never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
Child of all mothers, native of the earth.
So is no warmth for me at any fire
To-day, when the world's fire has burned so low;
I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,
At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,
And straighten back in weariness, and long
To gather up my little gods and go.
I can't find the wings that the flight attendant (they were stewardesses back then) gave me. My first flight on a jet plane, first trip just me and Daddy. We were going to visit all the family people, grandmas and whatnot who hadn't seen me since the accident. I remember the stewardesses passed food out. I can't tell if I really had peas and mashed potatos and meat, or if only Daddy did, or if neither of us did and my memory's remixing images, and I'm just seeing that plate's particular contents because now it's twenty-five years of TV later. What I do know is that I was little and special and with my daddy so they gave me plastic wings. And I wish I still had them now.
I wish like that about spending time with my grandparents. One of mine died when I was eight because she had cancer. She haunts me. Maybe I'm just a hauntable person. Because I was haunted by her long before she actually died. People can forget that a child is old enough to know that cancer means die. Old enough to know that more than a game of house is ending when Mommy comes in the room and tells Mandy to go home because you can't play anymore today. Old enough to burst into tears immediately upon impact of the news. Old enough to cry yourself to sleep every night and wish you could cry into a pan and fill it up and give it to God like a big spilling-over offering plate and say please please please don't take my grandma off the world because she is going to the devil if you do because she doesn't go to church.
I was haunted by her on sunny green-grass-flanked sidewalks that led the way up to sterilized hospice doors. The days could be gorgeous. I will never know how days can be so gorgeous when someone you love is standing in line to exit DAY forever. Visiting her kept me from some softball games, which was just as well since I was totally uncoordinated and humiliated by softball in those days. I was a child who didn't know the first thing about how to drive, how to have sex, how to divide or multiply, or even how to speak sometimes. But don't try to tell me that a child can't love or that a child can't grieve. Seven is plenty old enough to feel a softball-sized lump in your throat