Even as a child, my mother never talked down to me, neither babytalk
nor prattle, reader of more than fairytale or slick B’rer Rabbit trickery
before knowing better, and one spring late afternoon we stood on the
one white stoop slab looking across the broad swath at 2nd & American
intersection at what she called the taproom where a young man already
past his prime who’d been there before stood just outside its open door
and began a sweet, plaintive, lyric stardust memory, that matched
the chastened, enveloping spring dusk and said without looking at me,
You know, Gerald, he’s singing for his supper, and I did, even then,
before First Holy Communion, without yet knowing her words
but knowing what she meant wasn’t exactly supper he was singing for,
that every softness came with a price, and when finished, was escorted,
by an aproned insider who dabbed both eyes with a flowery kerchief, in.
My mother wore her floral or print dress the only ones I ever remember
her wearing, even into adulthood, never having owned a dressy dress,
which is what I thought then, still do, a real mother wore. She never looked
at me or had “a moment” with me, or me at her, or said anything of note
after he left his voice behind outside as an even softer April evening stole
upon us, or wondered if she were wistful, or lost in reverie, or inside a feeling,
when we went inside where we lived unsettled upstairs city lives that people
often led that side of town that soft spring dusk when even at four or five
nothing dreamy ever touched our lives back then I somehow knew I was
aleady beginning becoming a man.