Gentle Measures

CHAPTER I. THREE MODES OF MANAGEMENT

First, I would like to have with 248 women from the world’s
248 nations 248 children, then I would like to abandon them.
I know it’s not that easy. But when I am home, I can’t wait
to get moving, when I am moving I can’t wait to get home
again. Part of me loves when I’ve got no place to be.

CHAPTER II. WHAT ARE GENTLE MEASURES?

For the occasion she learns she will have no father
my Sri Lankan child will have to imagine, difficult as it is,
the depth of history, how humanity endures because it is,
at most, an idea. This scenario is also for my mother flirting
with a man twice her age and for the lonely child in me.

CHAPTER III. THERE MUST BE AUTHORITY

I will have a son named High Jinx, and a son named 44,
and a son named Mary. Some of my sons will wear bags
on their heads. Some of my sons will wait their whole lives
to board an ark called American Beauty.

CHAPTER IV. GENTLE PUNISHMENT OF DISOBEDIENCE

Mothers, various retributions should be divvied in the light
of each child’s sins. My children will not always be godly.
You have my permission to punish them as you would like
to punish me. (Your hands and knees must be bloodied.)

CHAPTER V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PUNISHMENT

I would like to abandon the child of a mother who dies
in a Luxemburg train wreck, and a mother kidnapped
by banana farmers in Belize; a mother taking refuge
alone in a mountain cave during a Peruvian flood.
Goddamn, I want to be as hardcore as my daddy.

CHAPTER VI. REWARDING OBEDIENCE

Thinking of me two or three myths their brains devise
will begin to divide in them, the tangible cells untangling
themselves until my absence seems to recede. My children
will find grease on their fingers after touching pictures of me.

CHAPTER VII. THE ART OF TRAINING

Sometimes I want to catch the hand of a child and go
“Life! Life! Life!” Sometimes I imagine an old naked woman waiting
as her tub fills with water. Or a knock-kneed girl using her face
as a shield. But I will not claim to know other people’s loneliness.

CHAPTER VIII. DELLA AND THE DOLLS

When my Korean daughter falls for the man who dresses
his lovers like dolls, I will not be there to say, “Being a doll
is as close as a toy can come to slavery,” I will not say “Isn’t it
exciting: the noon teas, the personalized songs and cradling?”

CHAPTER IX. METHODS EXEMPLIFIED

Children, here are some my favorite things: the tiny tongue
painted inside a doll’s tiny mouth, a phonograph record
spinning like a girl in a black skirt. Also the family drawing
one of you made though the father in it looks nothing like me.

CHAPTER X. SYMPATHY:–I. THE CHILD WITH THE PARENT

My little Belgian boy in a hat decorated with buttons
pulled from the shirt I left behind, my little Syrian girl
with a shoebox waiting for birthday cards she will not receive,
my farm boy with the tomatoes he tried selling to neighbors
who wanted pears. I plan to never keep photographs of them.

CHAPTER XI. SYMPATHY:–II. THE PARENT WITH THE CHILD

My mother had me when she was 16. The angle of her teeth,
she can barely shut her mouth, may have been inherited
from her father before he ran away. She told me, “If a strange man
ever appears at your door, kick him in his grin, Baby.
Kick him even if he begins to sing to you about me.”

CHAPTER XII. COMMENDATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT

Let’s praise everything that spurs the spirit to creativity.
The tin cup my father rattles until its poison spills,
how easily a mouth erupts with belief. Let’s praise
how much we love without loving, how little we sing while singing.

CHAPTER XIII. FAULTS OF IMMATURITY

We can try to praise the light blue powder of family
because it is not made of stone, it is not mist. You can’t hold it
long, but this is true of many things. Somewhere
in this brain is also my father’s misery. And whether it is better
to forgive or let yourself be forgiven eventually.

CHAPTER XIV. THE ACTIVITY OF CHILDREN

My child with no one to teach her how to skin a Bolivian goat
or make a necklace of Tanzanian wolf teeth, my kindergarteners
in Madagascar and Cuba, my daughter whose step-father
will die in a Kenyan coalmine, my daughter whose boots will fail
to warm her in the Ukrainian snow: their lives will be better without me.

CHAPTER XV. THE IMAGINATION IN CHILDREN

This is a wish for the child sleeping in grass that has wilted
a little, for the child lazing in the pool of a Beachside hotel.
This is for the child who overhears his mother cry
into the phone: “Don’t you put the bad mouth on me!”

CHAPTER XVI. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD

Sometimes my prayers begin: “Darkness, is that you
at my skull?” Because that’s one version of pain,
I’m always like “Angel, leave me the fuck alone.” I’m like
“Blame the devil of longing.” I have said I am in love with beauty,
but my heart is so mangled, it spills blood on everything.

CHAPTER XVII. JUDGMENT AND REASONING

In the high schools where the janitors speak French,
in Swaziland and Switzerland, on the small islands
where nuns show their knees, in places the word for “Father”
means nothing to me. Their lives will be better without me.

CHAPTER XVIII. WISHES AND REQUESTS

I would like to leave you to the moody cruelty and nurture
of your mothers, Children, to the complex rites and rituals
of your countries, to God gazing like a cop on a bike, to cocoa
and buzzards and crap inventions and the gospel of possibility.

CHAPTER XIX. CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

The bald headed mother dreaming through cancer of the sprawl
of highways and the wide open wilder Wilderness, the fluid
Holy light she can put her hand through, the rain beating
“I am” “I am” all over her body: it’s got nothing to do with me.

CHAPTER XX. CHILDREN’S QUESTIONS

At each door I want to slip on my shoes and say to each woman,
“Do what you do, Mother Goose.” And should one of you find me,
Children, I’ll downright lie and snap, “Shadow, why do you follow me
so? Ain’t you a long way from home too?” You don’t need me to know
what it means to be lonely. I won’t look back. I won’t look back at you.