IS IT TRUE OR FALSE

IS IT TRUE OR FALSE

I believed stories that the world was flat,

that it ended at the fence line, 

though I could see beyond it.

It is clearly an illusion, something to do with faith

and the shifting boundaries of the adult world.

She forgot yesterday’s milk

and it expanded, little paper lids perched caps

on the frozen necks of the bottles.

I only needed some sugar and to beat the cats to the cream.

The milkbox made a perfect stool to observe the known world,

the western hills ringed in fog—

milk separating the mystery from the field.

It’s true that dragons lived beyond the known world.

That the snake across the road was as big as a tree limb.

That the pale ghosts of fallen trees in the arroyo

were seen to move at dusk from the corners of the eye.

That no one believed in my ghosts who writhed at dusk;

I speculated they were bodies asleep in the leaf mold—

True or false: fiery centipedes glowed like phosphor on rotten logs,

and stung me in my sleep. That I really was an abandoned child.

Once ants really ran up my pants and I left them, screaming.

Once I thought gopher mounds were powdered chocolate,

my mother’s glass tubes of oil paints in the closet, vanilla ice cream.

I was afraid of the veins in chicken legs at Sunday dinners.

Is it true I didn’t understand the meaning of loss or beauty

and otherwise abstract notions until after the fact?

Maybe I dropped out of kindergarten because of the snake.

The chain across the road kept out the known world.

Was it true that living beyond the county-maintained road

meant we were invisible, untouchable in our poverty?

I remember the wealth of red earth and bay trees against summer sky.

Any car coming this far meant visitors, a break in routine,

A car weaving its way up the valley might be my mother.

Or another false alarm. The word “father” was a vacancy with no name.

Is it true or false that the shrapnel of memory is invisible or sharp

as the unspoken words that continue to survive us?

Or that in the darkness beneath my bed they waited

all these years to grab my ankles after all?

1/16/94  Bishop’s Ranch, Healdsburg 

I think this was from an Elderhostel class I taught there