I had a way of wandering that always brought me home.
I had a way of losing myself in the woods without getting lost.
O God take me back to that day, maybe tomorrow.
and over the meadow to Bobby’s just in time for lunch.
And along the way I’ll remember how to name every elbow
of the creek again, every fallen bridge-log after an Indian tribe,
Ojibawa Bend, Mohawk Crossing, and there between
two rivulets of raging Spring run-off, Leni Lenape Island.
I’ll bring along the five tiny green turtles I bought
at the sad pet shop in the basement of J. J. Newberry’s
Department Store, their shells already soft.
I hardly had them in their glass bowl a single day
before I decided to free them, so they could wander
the creek bed like me, just as I liberated two parakeets
the previous Winter. There was no time for death.
I watched them swim into the deep, imagining
how they would grow over the years into enormous
snapping turtles, kelp dangling from their jowls
like sideburns in pictures of Civil War officers.
My boots muddy, sloshing with creek slime,
I trudged the alfalfa field, scanning the bottom
of a pond for water snakes and giant frogs,
but it was tadpole time. l watched them wiggle awhile,
then ambled up the hill to Bobby’s club house
where he's always hammering away on his two-story
fully-electric fortress, and of course he’ll grow up
to be an engineer, and I a mere dreamer of poems.
I think about this as I ring the doorbell to call him
on the walky-talky he installed at the gate by the sign,
Bobby's Place. And I'm thinking, “Your own house,
you on the roof fixing a short-wave radio antenna,
me down here wandering nowhere," as I press
some mysterious button that opens the gate.
And after many years, I've come back to ask forgiveness.
You were my friend, and you never blamed me
for telling your mother about the cuss words.
They were pretty bad ones: the S word, a couple of B’s,
but no F bomb yet. Nevertheless I tattled,
“Mrs. Swayne, Bobby said shit again.”
Which left her no choice but to wash your mouth out
with soap at the kitchen sink while I looked on,
grimly righteous, smugly satisfied. You screamed
and cried, then dried your eyes with the back
of your hands, and we ate lunch as if nothing
had happened. You never talked about the terrible
soap, the betrayal, and I never said a word.
We just munched your mother’s bologna and
Velveeta sandwiches on Wonder Bread with ketchup,
and a side dish of cottage cheese with strawberry jam,
which I’ve never heard of anybody ever eating since.
Listen to this poem HERE. Painting by Andrew Wyeth
who lived just a few fields away from the one in this poem.
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