99 Poems by Dana Gioia

Author:Dana Gioia [Gioia, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-925-6
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

COUNTING THE CHILDREN

I.

“This must have been her bedroom, Mr. Choi.

It’s hard to tell. The only other time

I came back here was when I found her body.”

Neither of us belonged there. She lived next door.

I was the accountant sent out by the State

To take an inventory of the house.

When someone wealthy dies without a will,

The court sends me to audit the estate.

They know that strangers trust a man who listens.

The neighbor led me down an unlit hall.

We came up to a double door and stopped.

She whispered as if someone else were near.

“She used to wander around town at night

And rifle through the trash. We all knew that.

But what we didn’t know about was them.”

She stepped inside and fumbled for a switch.

It didn’t work, but light leaked through the curtains.

“Come in,” she said. “I want to show you hell.”

I walked into a room of wooden shelves

Stretching from floor to ceiling, wall to wall,

With smaller shelves arranged along the center.

A crowd of faces looked up silently.

Shoulder to shoulder, standing all in rows,

Hundreds of dolls were lining every wall.

Not a collection anyone would want—

Just ordinary dolls salvaged from the trash

With dozens of each kind all set together.

Some battered, others missing arms and legs,

Shelf after shelf of the same dusty stare

As if despair could be assuaged by order.

They looked like sisters huddling in the dark,

Forgotten brides abandoned at the altar,

Their veils turned yellow, dresses stiff and soiled.

Rows of discarded little girls and babies—

Some naked, others dressed for play—they wore

Whatever lives their owners left them in.

Where were the children who promised them love?

The small, caressing hands, the lips which whispered

Secrets in the dark? Once they were woken,

Each by name. Now they have become each other—

Anonymous except for injury,

The beautiful and headless side by side.

Was this where all lost childhoods go? These dim

Abandoned rooms, these crude arrangements staged

For settled dust and shadow, left to prove

That all affection is outgrown, or show

The uniformity of our desire?

How dismal someone else’s joy can be.

I stood between the speechless shelves and knew

Dust has a million lives, the heart has one.

I turned away and started my report.

II.

That night I dreamt of working on a ledger,

A book so large it stretched across my desk,

Thousands of numbers running down each page.

I knew I had to settle the account,

Yet as I tried to calculate the total,

The numbers started slipping down the page,

Suddenly breaking up like Scrabble letters

Brushed into a box to end a game,

Each strained-for word uncoupled back to nil.

But as I tried to add them back together

And hold each number on the thin green line

Where it belonged, I realized that now

Nothing I did would ever fit together.

In my hands even 2 + 2 + 2

No longer equaled anything at all.

And then I saw my father there beside me.

He asked me why I couldn’t find the sum.

He held my daughter crying in his arms.

My family stood behind him in a row,

Uncles and aunts, cousins I’d never seen,

My grandparents from China and their parents,

All of my family, living and dead,

A line that stretched as far as I could see.

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