I decided to test
the power of now.
A glance from a freeway feeder…

Three gables. Three stories.
Prospect to the sun
with starfinger peaks,
three kings back then,
but only relics now
in this gentried neighborhood.

Three gables.  Three stories.
Through an upstairs pane
Gina's ozone eyes--
deaf to Dad's gin rage--
green seeds of a new generation.

Three gables.  Three stories.
Rosalinda Jimenez Paz
seventy years trapped
in the cracks of the wall,
but in one bright piece of her mind
a giggle of discovery--
the time little Pablo
showed her his.

What evil pierced my eyes,
harpoon quivering a dread,
at the age of five, too tender
for that frightful sight
of men behind the wire
pacing--lost--and staring shame
into that pure child...

Mine the third story
below the gables' glow
cellared in my psyche,
safe till the passing sight
of those three hoary dwellings
and the shadowy murmur
they cast across my soul.

The strange momentary sighting of these houses and my writing of this poem eventually led me to retrieve a forgotten or suppressed boyhood memory.  My parents visited a friend in Mississippi who was a prison warden.  I suppose they had "prepared" me by telling me how horrible these criminals were.  Seeing the prisoners behind the tall cyclone fence was eerie and disturbing to me.  The cellblocks were in three stark, wide-gabled buildings.

06/10/2003

Posted on 06/11/2003
Copyright © 2024 Glenn Currier