The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

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Notes for a Childhood I

i.

Words with no meanings—
hibiscus, yes, bougainvillea, croton
and the others, trade winds, Sergeant Majors.
At the edge of the known the octopus
turned inside-out to pink, the nuns
who comb our tangled hair each afternoon
on the porch. Octo is eight,
says mamma and the nuns are named
Sister Owen Phillip, Sister Immaculata.
Even the saccharine smell under the rubber
cone has a name: ether. I need
a word for my hand, for a certain
sort of skin that, surface warm, contains
such cold I shiver every time I look.

ii.

Without looking she slung her forearm
across my middle in those days before
seatbelts when she careened up to
each stop sign as if it would melt
under her cold eye. No.
They always stayed put and warranted
that arm athwart the front seat,
the reliable OOF of a small unwilling chest,
its air puffed out, and God help us
if I hit the dash—the metal hard as sin—
and wore the bruise because of her slow arm
too late to save me. From mamma, I learn
to race toward whatever stops us hating it,
slamming the brakes at the last instant.

iii.

An instant of twirling, hair slung in slow motion,
skirt a vivid absence of color spun out
in abundant circles like the hub of a childhood,
chestnut and sharkskin in that perfect moment
of turning. No screaming. No sweet, sick smell.
No veins on her neck pulsing. Instead,
mamma spins, arms held out like the wings on a B52,
slim fingers curled in, palming the secret
of what a hand might do. Beautiful. Silent.
Turning in the land of ’47 Chevys, Eisenhower
and the GI Bill. Like America after the war,
running right up to the edge,
her breath jarred loose by Buck Rogers,
her future flung forward into decades of fists.

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