Music From Big Pink

“If you remember the ’60’s, you weren’t there.” 

Robin Williams

That Saturday when she turned three, the morning

of the equinox, the pale sky full of winter shards,

we took a walk to Philipsburg, the eighteenth century

working farm with water wheel and creaking gears

turning the massive grey millstone.

But the history was lost on her;

she cared less for men in woolsey pants

and trefoil hats than for the large, slow-moving

oxen grazing in the distant fields. 

(So tiny in her hot pink jacket, 

sized 18 months and drowning her - Oh

little pink, my pounding heart!) 

It was her first birthday since the adoption

six months before when we had flown to China

to bring her back, this two year old without a home,

who’d gone too long to not belong.

(And she was so smart, 

I knew it in my heart—and so adept, 

yet still not forming sentences.)

The oxen were still wandering

in the open fields as she was pulling us 

towards them. “Ox,”we told her.“Ak,” she said. 

She walked right up to one big boy and placed

her face into his fur and dug her hands into his side. 

She breathed in, really burrowed in,

then turned her head and cried,

“Mami! Mami! The ak went poopaloop.”

Those hands spread out against his fur,

her tiny face lost in his hide, I will keep until

my last breath; I will take it to the afterlife.

But Woodstock. Living in my room?

I have no memory of that.

Wolfboy

Victor, when he emerged, from the woods in 1800, was possibly twelve years of age.  

Those mornings when your foster mom would say

your real mother was coming for the day, you’d jump up 

from the bed, get dressed, run to the curb and 

sit all day, hungry, cold, not moving ’til 

the sun went down and it got dark

and she would never come. 

Like the time my dad forgot 

the day my baby sis was born

that he’d left my other sis and me, five and three, 

still waiting on the front lawn of the hospital for hours.  

He thought the laundry man was watching us.

I remember swinging from a branch, the orange

sky behind the tree, the cold night turning 

into grey until at last somebody came. . . 

I know. It’s not the same. But 

we don’t know what people are;

it’s like another world: the trees cut down

the roots all gone, the woods not there to comfort us.

I miss our bed, the snuffled cries,

the bed of needles not that bad.

Landscape (2021) Nicolas Party