High School Boyfriend
You are home town.
You are all my favorite places
the last summer I grew up.
Every once in a while
I write you
in my head
to ask how Viet Nam
and a big name college
came between us.
We tried to stay in touch
through the long distance,
the hum and fleck of phone calls.
It was inevitable
that I should return
to the small prairie town
and find you
pumping gas, driving a truck, measuring lumber,
and we’d exchange weather talk,
never be able to break through words
and time to say simply:
Are you as happy
as I wanted you to be?
And still I am stirred
by musky cigarette smoke
on a man’s brown suede jacket.
Never having admitted the tenderness
of your hands, I feel them now
through my skin.
Parking on breezy nights,
in cars, floating passageways,
we are tongue and tongue like warm cucumbers.
I would walk backwards
along far country roads
through late evenings, cool as moving water,
heavy as red beer,
to climb into that August.
In the dark lovers’ lanes,
you touched my face
and found me here.
© Margaret Hasse
Stars Above, Stars Below, New Rivers Press, 1984
My Mother’s Lullaby
When my mother
smelling of milk and bread
brushes the long robe of my hair,
the vines spring roses.
We wake in a white bed
floating with feather pillows.
Morning patterns her face.
She curls me in her arms;
she is a seashell,
pale and full of song.
And now I come to tuck
my little mother into bed.
I am too young to be empty-armed
and the weeds in my throat
will not let me sing lullabies.
Waiting has teeth in it.
My mother smiles at me
and wraps around herself.
I won’t see her cry;
her wheat body does not even shake.
She will not know
how echoes return.
Silent tears are turquoise
peacock feathers which tickle
and the hyena in me laughs,
crazy, crazy.
And my mother
on her thin shelved bed
hears the dogs move restlessly.
There is a clack of their nails
on linoleum.
She knows they have come for her,
She whimpers, they whimper.
Soon there will be no one
to tell what I was like
when I was a child.
© Margaret Hasse
Stars Above, Stars Below, New Rivers Press, 1984
Poems from Stars Above, Stars Below by Margaret Hasse
