Koethe - Ninety-fifth Street

I hated going there: It wasnt frightening so much as claustrophobic and unclear, Like something difficult to see, then harder to recall. What I remember most of all are houses, like the large Victorian manse on Fir Street that I loved to paint With watercolors, just across the street from where I stayed When I had chicken pox, with my mother away at work And my father away again in Japan, with an elderly retired couple What was their name?who reminded me of Martha Hoople and the Major. I love the way remembering lets the light in, as the sullen gray Of consciousness dissolves into a yard, a pepper tree, a summer day, And minor moments and details that had been buried in the past Take on the clarity of dreams, with a transparency they never had in life. It isnt true. Some moments lie beyond the light, like the twins My sister swears that she remembers when they came home from the hospital, Who lived with us awhile before they died. Theyre just a blank to me: It must have been on Maxim Street, and yet theres nothing there.

Sometimes an image of two figures in a crib seems just about to jell, But it never sets, and then it melts away. I try to see my life As a single narrative, with parts already there, and others to be filled in By long chains of association, or the crumbling of a madeleine. I cant believe that some of them are gone, as if theyd never happened Like another persons life, or one that flows in parallel with mine Along its separate course, made up of the redacted parts Like the dark matter making up the universe, or the averted face That slowly turns to you at the climax of a nightmare, as a scream starts. The neighborhood is gone. Long after we had moved away There was a fire (I think), and then a freeway through downtown. Somehow Ive saved enough of it to re-create that world, However incompletely: vacant lots where I caught butterflies And shot birds with a BB gun whose cocking handle Smashed my fingers once outside the watercolor house; The walks home from St.

Josephs in my corduroys and cardigan; The Mad Dog! Mad Dog! chasing me along a wall I dont need all of them to know those parts were real. The end Of Catholic school, the start of physics, track, my fathers nervous breakdown All lay in the future. Ive gone back to other places where Ive lived, But I cant go there now, which makes it seem the most mysterious of all. The airplanes coming in for landings at the airport flew so low That you could see the pilots from the roof, and lying there in the dark Id worry that a Russian bomber was descending to destroy us all. When Nana died I remember listening to my parents murmuring softly In the early morning darkness as my father packed for Texas And I wondered if shed burn in hell because she was a Baptist. A morbid child? I hope not, though how would I know? It was all about eternitya modest one perhaps, but still eternity.