Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [64]
Her restless glance fell on her bedside table, where in a stack of unread books she spied a slim purple and white paperback: e. e. cummings, Poems. She reached over to pick it up. She’d ordered the volume from an online bookseller several weeks earlier; her book club was reading it for April. Judy Liefert, whose turn it was to choose, had explained that she’d read it in high school and it had changed her life, and she wanted to see how it held up.
Several dissenters, primarily Marly Peters and Jan O’Hara, had argued that poetry wasn’t appropriate for a book club. “It’s so … inscrutable,” Jan said, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Poets never say what they mean, they just expect you to figure it out. And there isn’t even a plot. Why don’t we do the latest Jodi Picoult?”
But the lit majors and the intellectually defensive in the group rose up to defeat them. We aren’t just a bunch of beach-reading housewives, damn it! We can analyze poetry!
Still, Alison thought, e. e. cummings. It wasn’t exactly Pound.
She leafed through the volume, drifting in and out of the poems, and alighted on one that immediately felt so close to her own experience it was almost painful to read. It was from a man to his lover; it had nothing to do with Alison’s life, and yet it stirred something in her.
Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
For Alison the boy who had died was present in these words, his innocence and potential, her connection to him. She read the poem aloud in a whisper. A chant, a eulogy.
Once upon a time there was a little boy who was three years old.
“Who was it?” Noah said.
“I don’t know his name.”
“Where did he live?”
“I don’t know.”
Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience…
“What happened to him?”
“He stayed three years old forever.”
“He never turned four?”
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near…
“No. He never turned four.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t want to. He liked being three, I guess.”
“Oh.” Noah stretched out, wiggled his feet, turned over and buried his head in her armpit. “That’s not a very good story, Mommy,” he said, his voice muffled in her shirt.
“Why not?”
He looked up, his expression far away, as if he’d been thinking about something important and had come to a momentous conclusion. “Teletubbies are not people,” he said.
She nodded.
“Why aren’t they people?” he wondered.
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
“Because they don’t have hands,” she said. She gathered him up, lifting the bottom-heavy weight of him in her arms, and cradled him like a baby. “Did you ever notice that? Did you ever notice they don’t have hands?”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “They just don’t have fingers.”
“You’re right,” she said, laughing.
“Their hands are mittens.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Why? Why are their hands mittens?”
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing …
The words were magical in their strangeness, vibrating with loss and hope and wonder, a rubric for her own tangled emotion. She could not have expressed, out loud, to Charlie or her parents or anybody, what she was feeling, but these words gave her access to it.
“But why?” Noah persisted.
“That’s just how they’re made,” she said. “Why do you have brown eyes and brown hair?”
“Because I look like you.”
“Oh,” she said with surprise. It was true—he did look like her. “Well—right. And the mommy Teletubbie has mitten hands, too,” she said, pleased with herself for following his logic.
He nodded. “But where is the mommy Teletubbie?”
“She’s there,