Poem: March 19, 2019

1977

I remember we lived in an apartment in married housing
on the campus of Michigan State University because Dad
had taken a research sabbatical, which meant that we
had been transplanted from our Victorian farmhouse
into a 2-bedroom space made of cinderblock and linoleum.
On Halloween my sister and I went down the rows
of our quad in the costumes Mom had made- Kristen,
a five-year-old Princess Leia with hair buns made out
of brown yarn. And I was Darth Vader, my mask crafted
from foil and cardboard and papier-mâché, so much
cooler than the plastic costumes the other kids wore.
Everything was Star Wars that year, of course. The world
had just been shown something bigger than itself, and I
wanted to own every piece of that future: action figures
and trading cards, bedsheets and lunchboxes. And all
those new words to play with, like Jawa and Tatooine.
Suddenly, there was so much more to be knowledgable
about. That kind of mythology makes an impression.
But so does a year-long sabbatical in a college town.
I remember that year of my childhood better than any other,
walking to the International School between walls of snow
piled four-feet high on either side of the sidewalk,
giving myself over to my first kiss with a girl named Jennifer
from Hawaii, hidden from view in a huge concrete pipe
on the playground. And meeting Magic Johnson in a park
near campus and realizing how little I knew about
the passions that sports can engender (what a turncoat I
seemed to my classmates the following year in Indiana).
I remember learning the word fuck from a precocious girl
from London who also explained that this was something
flashers did when they opened their trench coats to one another,
and then learning that her apartment caught fire the next day.
And I still think about making friends with the neighbor kid
from Thailand who always wore denim coveralls and
laughing like mad because we called testicles balls and
they called them eggs. And this is all really just to say that
new experiences make new neural pathways, and in 1977
my nine-year-old brain was laying down the synaptic
equivalent of the interstate highway system, across which
I've traveled back and forth ever since. The landscape
of my mind is a terrain built by potent forces: infatuation,
exotic cooking spices, epic conflicts between dark
and light, smart-mouthed heroines, emergent sexuality,
the sudden awareness of what I do not know, and
the wonders of language, how it feels in my mouth.
I return to these spaces again and again, and so
I suppose that it is no surprise that I find myself
so easily attached to you. Born in 1977, perhaps you
were encoded with the contours and markings
of the map I have been studying since my life began.