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Part Maybe One, Maybe Point One

Hell, I don’t know.
Maybe five years of age:
sitting on my very own red toy tractor with pedals,
staring at

My mother gazes out a window at me
staring at

She called it a brown study.

Forty acre goat farm. Never made a nickel.
Wandered down one Summer late afternoon
to where the old man
sitting at a stanchion, a goat milking stand
He’s moved it outside the barn for the season.
He can sit watching the setting sun
and squirt milk.
May not be a better activity in the world.

Hey whatcha doin’?
Maybe I’m seven? He’d been lying in wait.
Put me to work, those little hands
squeezing such large teats.
Cats wandering by.

The Rebellious Years came and went,
here I am late teens
spry as a jack
lean as a goat
Still sleeping with my catcher’s mitt.
Jump down from the top of a sweet smelling
loaded wagon of baled hay.

At twenty one a friend of mine said
I’m not making as many mistakes as I did
last year.

This I remember.

Part 1.2

Hell, I don’t know
Eight years old?
From the old photo of me
in my underwear and cowboy boots
strapping a holster and cap gun, maybe younger.

My god forsaken January fifth birthday
A tall stack of boxes in the kitchen!
I’m as usual only half aware of my life.
It comes back to me in bent-edge sepia brown.

Each box holding a precious item
of Cowboy Uniform. I was maybe
ecstatic. The parents looked on proudly.
There may even have been chaps.

But it was January fifth. A long long way from summer.

In Summer I’d awaken long after the parents had gone off
to their lousy blue collar jobs.
Mom working for Sears And Roebuck.
Dad stocking shelves somewhere on the south side of town.

I’d awaken to the cooing of mourning doves
A day full of promise and freedom.
Seminal memories of strange forbidding freedom

There were weeds to pull in the garden, a bully goat to feed
Was I too young to be dragged out of a deep sodden sleep
to feed cattle, milk goats? I’d climb into the hayloft
kick a few bales down the chute.

Afternoons spent at the municipal pool
playing Jump Or Dive with Bobby Hanger.

PART 1.3

You could get a burger fries and a coke
for nineteen cents
at the run down no-name drive-in
across the street from the municipal pool.

That would also buy you a gallon of gas
when the gas wars started up.

You buy a season pass at the pool
they still had high dives
the concrete was warm and you could
lie on it to warm up all wet
your buddies lying like spokes
on a wheel, telling tall tales

I’d get up early, bike down to pick up
my burden of state journals
fling the papers at porches
try to collect the dues

The Dairy Queen had soft serve
cones the size of manhattan
for fifty cents. These rose
swirling toward the heavens
you had to lick fast

But fifty cents was a fortune

I had my bike.
With my bike I could get anywhere
My bike my mitt my bat my ball

They picked teams in the stands at Evans Field
captains first, then the round robin of gradually
eroding talent, down to me, a first comer.

Every team had a jersey, all different colors
The jersey meant you belonged to something.
the flag you rallied around, and the captain
you quietly worshipped.

They put me in left field, with my casserole mitt

And my growing undying love of the game.