When I was a child
I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.
This poem too--I like it, not because I have some memory of abuse, because I don't. But this Writers Almanac poem opens up the crap shoot that growing up is--really, that life is. Who knows what sticks in our minds and souls? Nobody. Nor does anyone know why. On the basis of some undefinable permutations, some impressions and perceptions from each of our pasts simply won't die but knock around in our conscious minds as if they had their own life, which they apparently do.
He knew one joke, or at least the Grandpa in my mind knew only one joke. He likely knew more, but my five-year old memory held on to just one. So a couple walked into a railroad station, looking to get away. "Two to Dulut'," the guy says. The station manager thought the guy was kidding. "Well, tee, teetle, ee." He thought that was blindingly funny, and I laughed along, obligingly.
There's nothing particularly untoward about those memories or my grandfather, but the sound of his slippers was there as if I'd just heard it yesterday. It just happens that last week, for the first time in my life, I was in Dulut'. Of course, Grandpa's knee-slapper showed up.
Nothing about his funeral has stayed. I have no memory of it. Or do I? Perhaps some morning, brushing my teeth, some artifact will emerge from whatever primordial ooze holds the catalog of our strange impressions and perceptions.
In "Monkey Mind," some thorny issues of a whacking he have never really left the narrator's consciousness, even become obsessive. He remembers being swatted unjustly for what he's always assumed was simple, childhood curiosity. Made no sense. Today, he's old enough to understand all of that, but he can't forget, he can't. The whacking has hung in there from the day it happened so long ago, even though today his father is dying.
I'm a victim of all of this too. I suppose we all are. Not only that, but I can't help but wonder what injustices I inflicted on my own children--and have likewise forgotten. The old man likely remembers nothing of the events which haunt the kid. What don't I know about what I said or did when my children were simply curious--or simply kids? Maybe I'd rather not know.
A mind's storehouse of memory is a curious mystery. Even a little scary. What makes "Monkey Mind" a poem, what makes it art, is not it's soaring beauty. This morning this odd little story awakened in me an otherwise forgotten moment of my own life, as, I'm guessing, it did yours.
"Monkey Mind" belongs to Stephen Orlen, but to me and, if I'm right, to you too. It's ours.
That makes it good.
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