A Poem About Childhood
You don't know how to begin,
so you start
with second grade
and your class
coloring pictures of fruit bowls.
Mrs. Gogin holds up Marvin's picture,
(Marvin, who is quiet and not always clean and not
good at anything) and says,
Look how Marvin took the time to outline each grape.
You want to write a poem
that helps you understand
why this one sentence
has remained with you.
One of your first memories
is of yourself being unkind.
Your parents took you shopping
and there was a girl crying
because her mother wouldn't buy her
the pajamas she wanted.
You didn't like them,
but you said you wanted them
and it made you happy
that you got the pajamas
and she didn't.
The pajamas were yellow
and you wore them all summer.
Self Portrait with Saint John the Baptist
After Hans Memling c. 1475 (self portrait peering around pillar)
In the Middle Ages the Church had offered a universal view, but its craftsmen mostly worked within the constraint of a prescribed iconography in which the peasant view had a place but was not formative.
At first it was only the lamb
who came to keep him company,
the lonely saint with beautiful
calves and clean feet. But you
couldn't resist exploiting the brush,
documenting the coarse fringe
of dark hair and the effeminate
hands that reminded you
of your mother's touch
at the back of your neck.
You wanted the precise blue
of that frock, the sparse
eyebrows, the bloodless
mouth, the homely, pouchy eyes
to exist for a moment
in the room with him —
The saint who was the nephew
of God himself. Whose head
became a payment for the dance
of the seven veils. Don't I
understand? So much talk
was of immortality. You couldn't
help yourself, Hans.
Gretchen Marquette is a graduate student at Hamline University, where she served as the 2011 assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review. Her work has appeared in Poetry City USA, Sleet Magazine, and has been featured in the Red Bird Broadside Project and the What Light Poetry Series. She lives in Minneapolis.