AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY JUNE

 

It was the day of our neighborhood fair, the street closed from one end to the other to make room for carnival rides, local food vendors, and musicians. Kids with faces painted as jungle cats or superheroes strode up and down, panting dogs lapped up the water left out for them. Someone at the coffee shop had paid in advance for the next person's order, a gesture which was quickly taken up by the next, and the next, on and on, each new customer surprised by this mild act of generosity. The cash register grew quiet, the tip jar was emptied and filled again. I like to think this small, impromptu ritual went on long after I left, their smiles and nods, the polite raising of their glasses, stranger to stranger. "Kippis!," as my daughter and I say at home, a Finnish toast I first heard as "keep us" -- as in, keep us well, keep us together, keep us close to the source of this love, whatever the name. Keep us here, savoring that first sweet sip the whole length of the day.

HAUNTED HOUSE

 

Throughout the sweltering day at the fair,

strolling the miles of sticky, littered sidewalks,

air thick with the smell of August sweat,

beer, and sugar spun a hundred different ways,

my young daughter pleads repeatedly

to enter the dark gates of the haunted house.

She is drawn by the canned siren screams

piped through speakers perched on either side

of the cemetery's artificial grass, entranced

by the cool, gray tombstones hovering

above a shifting sea of mist, the thin limbs

of skeletons reaching up from below.

She wants nothing more than to be scared

out of her flesh, laughing all the while.

Each time we pass I must remind her that

the spooky castle, as she calls it, is meant only

for bigger kids, and each time I am met

with an exaggerated sigh of disappointment.

I do not speak of my own quiet fears,

the worst ones that eventually came true

or were erased by others more immediate,

ones that settled in like unwelcome squatters,

nudging one another to make room;

nor do I mention every terror that I hold

on her behalf, ones I cannot yet see, but sense

feeding on shadow, gathering strength.

One day she will turn away from my warnings.

One day I will have to let go just enough,

let the devils dance in their costumes

of flesh, and every mad beast around her roar;

one day I must trust the light within her

to repel every ghost yet to come.

TUNNEL OF LOVE

 

Were we so easily amused a mere hundred years ago? Was the achingly slow motion of these tiny painted boats crawling through the water a thrill worth paying for, while we sweated through our starched, buttoned shirts and summer wool, hands folded like sleeping birds in our laps? Was it somehow old, even when it was new, creaking as though every motion would be its last, the thinnest shafts of light breaking through its walls? No, you assure me, It's meant to be this slow, so slow that you hardly realize you're moving. It's meant to go nowhere, letting you out right where you came in. Look around. There's a reason it has the longest lines of anything else out here.