(Note: The following is the sixth movement in a twenty-three poem sequence the entirety of which constitutes Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse, CavanKerry Press).
6
I hate the facts as much as you do: our just-another-
American-story strewn
throughout with the usual mass-produced consumer
cheapness. All true, the over-
whelming melodramatic tackiness, the de-crap-itude,
including your aunt’s
thirty-six day coma, her brain damage that’s wrought
one family tragedy after
another such that your cousin, right now, with no
sense of remorse, is in
an Orlando prison for selling meth & grand-larceny,
the last of your grandfather’s
life savings having gone to pay restitution to his victims.
Divorces, foreclosures, accidents, lawsuits, abortions,
& seven thousand other
dramatic occasions––poverty’s ravishments. And on it goes.
One moves as far away
as possible, holds it at arm’s length. Your second father’s
icy heart nearly killed me.
As it turned out, he was gay, & after aversion hypnosis
(“when you desire a man,
you will feel nauseous”) failed to work, other lifestyle
choices were called for,
but I’d left by then & taken you & your sister,
moved to a commune.
He brought all his stupidities into our marriage, & I made
fancy cakes & puddings
out of them since I was still my mother’s daughter,
living out her dream
to marry into White Southern Aristocracy (instead of the
Brooklyn-Jewish
hoypoloi she got). Thoroughly sexist of course, &
his racism, well, call it
anti-whiteism. He’d rather have been a Black man than
the white homosexual
he turned out to be, perhaps because the only true
compassion he’d known
came to him from the men & women who worked
for his family on that
decaying antebellum estate in Carloville, Alabama, that
red-clayed, pecan-treed,
fire-ant haven of malignant neglect & ossified traditions.
Thus his move to the slums
of Baltimore to be near his true folk, & the ex-con drug
addict who’s beaten
him nearly to death repeatedly, gone back to prison
for it, been forgiven by him
& given him AIDS, & who, of late, bought smack with
every cent of your &
your sister’s inheritance––well, that’s accounted for in some
theory of just-recompense
that may or may not relate to an individual life. But what
does this have to do with you, with me?
He came into your life when you were four & you began
to stutter. He’d scream at you,
Get it out! Get it out of your goddamn mouth! walking away
from you whenever
you tried to talk to him, & then I’d scream at him
for screaming at you, &
that only made matters worse. We lived in post-war
temporary housing,
still temporary twenty years after the war. You may
remember the neighborhood––
a school across from us, playground on the corner, where,
once, on your blue bike
you were hit by a car. I remember the long Western
vest your second father liked
to wear. It was dyed purple & he’d get high on a few tokes
& swing the leather fringe
back & forth, rocking in his boots, swishing his long
brown hair across his face,
blissed-out, grinning. The only time he ever looked free.
He was the third man that year, the year I was twenty-two,
to propose to me,
& my mother wanted us out of the house, so I married
him, knowing him only
six weeks. He was a virgin, I was, well, promiscuous.
Little Boy Blue, sweet,
wild, little child. I see you trying to block the door when
we were leaving on our honey-
moon, November 1966 & we drove to New Orleans.
I wore a silk-&-lace peignoir
that night, pretending to be a real bride, but the cheap try
wasn’t lost on me.
Still, out of this, we got your good & loving sister.