Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Twentieth-Century Children (2)

Everything she finds she drags home,
the cat, the ruined boots, the rusted knife,
the legless doll-

Can I keep it? And the boy is packing
a snowball in the freezer to save
for August. The sisters, no wiser, are
keeping warm

some small blue eggs on a cotton ball
constellation under mother's make-up lamp.
Things will stay.

Things will wait. This child's
America cooks up forever, and the stars
get pasted in their Book of Looks-

This light.
This word.
This favored found stone they sleep with.
And the moth they've sealed in

a plastic pin box and buried beneath
their folded summer shirts, so that someday
when they leave or when

they marry, they will find it
still, thing
and no more
the dream around it-

Back to IR Spring 1999