Seven Poems About Children
Terry Hermsen
House of Her Birth
Slanted to the hill: this orchard of cracked bark.
The whip of wind, the thrasher’s greedy yapping
disappear into green.
*
On my hip, on the ladder—she’ll not bide the plastic pen,
must dip the basket, divide the cherry’s eye,
driveling juice over the both of us.
*
Wild rocking blades of the rototiller
rip the brown clods of earth, swallow thistles (bristle-crowned)
near where the blackberries tangle their August tongue.
*
A succulence of voices swims in her crib, choruses and fragments
from records an hymns, begun in the rocker that first blue night
as the whole house dipped back into sleep.
*
Toppling, her stiff small muscles lunge
to clasp her fear, to fearless rise,
ring the room with a jabbering dance.
*
Evenings, the shadows crowd closer;
flames wake the black pipe of the stove;
stars make their meal of leaves.
-Terry Hermsen (from Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre)
They Thought It was Snowing
November, there is more light in the woods,
where the last leaves drag down,
hit the slow air, coiling like a tribe of tongues around
a strange word, tongues in the wind feeling their way
toward what they’ve just come to know.
Then the sky all at once
drapes blue down to its edge. I lift the chainsaw
from its case, like a baby or a mauser,
choose only the dead trees… so many cracked midway, fallen
east, as if in the same storm.
*
This morning I saw a dying man,
though only his eyes knew, as they clung to my face.
For two hours he would play with his Styrofoam water cup,
tip it and with his forefinger
drop water from the straw onto the paper napkin,
ironing the folds with the base, grinding in his throat,
“If we just get this one,
that’s right, now there’s this.”
So many days without dreaming ((under medication),
his mind locked like a log stacked deep inside the pile.
*
When I finish, it’s dusk; the woods are stilled.
Driving home, the moon is circled with a gauze of color,
the long black fields spiked with stalks.
Shadows of our neighbors pass over their blinds
as my tires find the rut of the gravel drive.
Inside, wrapped in her crib, my daughter sprawls.
The miles away, on the third floor of a green-block building,
her grandfather keeps dying.
In bed, Carla tells me that while I was gone
our daughter played hospital,
laying grocery bags over the zonked stuffed animals
so the germs wouldn’t spread.
Then soothing the untouched elephant, bear and donkey,
she said, “They thought their daddy was dead,
but really he was working,”
as she lined them up, straightening their ears,
moving their feet on the long march
past the window, the kitchen, their row of friends,
saying, “They thought it was snowing,
but it was really dancing light.”
-Terry Hermsen (from Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre)
Driving Home
"Daddy, when we get to the top of that hill, are
we going to disappear?" -in the car, age 2
Midway between Mt. Gilead and Shelby,
Route 314 dips low to the Clearfork Reservoir.
Several lights like paired fates
flip up or over the ridge across the valley.
Weary from months of teaching, I slide the car
out of gear and coast down in the dark.
In the backseat, now ten, my daughter sprawls,
for once glad of the hour. And her mother,
turned chin, shoulders, hips and knees
to her window, is silent. I am silent.
Held above the earth, in its late season,
in our small orbit, bent to geology,
what consequence? We rise over the gap,
my only, and yes, we disappear.
-Terry Hermsen (from The River’s Daughter)
Child Aloft in Ohio Theater
You do not know the headlines or the daily fate
of others with weight and size and eyes like yours,
lifted from their cribs till their lashed necks shake
and their senses are battered dense by their fathers,
who would sleep. You do not know the plot
of the movie, or the myths embedded in the bronze heights
above you: Neptune and the Sirens, shined bellies and breasts
beckoning to the sea's court, to lights
more elusive than these above our heads
ablaze from sudden red horizon (at intermission)
that draw your body from its makeshift balcony bed
to ride aloft there too as your father suns
you, in a little leap, as he lets you go,
legs an inch from safety and his fingers.
You rise again, with the slightest toss, then in air slow,
fall to his lap like lead. "Again," you say for the lure
of separation, magic pull of those rayed stars,
rippling gold streaks up the backlit wall
as the last spot dims and you dare
to laugh, having hands in which to fall.
-Terry Hermsen (from Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre)
Skipping Stones with Noah
-for our deaf son-
Streamers from the sun lay down upon the river
and the trees settle in for their late August roosting.
Noah checks my hand to see how I’m holding the stone
then slumps when his next throw trails off to a thunk.
With so few words he carries his memory of the world
in the twists of a trunk, a full body twirl,
his hands above his head to trace the hollow of an eddy,
his arms chasing the heron’s thin flight.
Tiny clamshells gather their detritus
in dry pockets along the river’s slate shelves
and opened, set on the bobbing scrim,
become such temporary boats.
Tonight the river is ours,
though two fishermen have left their chairs
as if to save their places for a parade.
And that is what we are, what this shallow current is,
as we choose the thinnest stones, approximate our balance here
all the way to dark, trying to conjure that single glide
where the hand or the toss or the riding slate itself
has nearly become the water.
-Terry Hermsen (from The River’s Daughter)
Children’s Drawings
in gratitude to Robert Coles and
Their Eyes Meeting the World
We choose, almost always, the solitary figure,
hence our passion for the sun, which waits, we say,
here, behind a smudge of clouds,
or smiles at a squished angle
above the teacher with her glaring eyes.
Here is a "voof" (they ask:
a "wolf"? No a "voof") and its dish
of blue food. We come to listen for the names
the figures give. And always
where the light comes from.
Red glow around the head of an angry nap,
or slipped through the cracks of the purple flower –
these are the gaps we slide between,
wishing to swim. Where do the hands go, when a hand
draws a hand? At the side of the head – or extended
toward us as if grown from the belly?
A hunger we feed, this smear of color
set down to serve the route of a shape,
to make the world, head
sunk into legs, link up again.
Here a spy bides in black stations
past the green of his hidden home. Here the blue
swaths of walkers, bent in their columns,
ascend across the blue-dotted snow.
-Terry Hermsen (from The River’s Daughter)
The Mayor’s Promise
Into his rooms too the rats crept,
nightly gnawing the arches over his fire
or his bed. So when the knock of the pied coat stranger
broke the deliberations, he knew where the coins slept
but not how the children would follow. The mornings
are quiet now. He has time to trace shadows
across the ceiling or turn as the light grows
fierce inside the mirror as on a spit of its faint string.
He has time to swallow days, or curl
inside a promise, bend a moment till
it prays, lay the shoes out for the lame
boy, who was too late when the stone door closed.
His, the after-wisdom, fingers on the dark holes
of the silver forgotten pipe, that plays two ways.
-Terry Hermsen (from The River’s Daughter)