The God of Pockets

The God of Pockets smiles on children. On their thumb-polished chestnuts. And what She, in her benevolence, sees as their innocent lint. She sees the lucky penny drop, knows the hunger of keys. Knows what the landlord has tallied on his calculator. Knows the man who sleeps outside the library. In particular, the flattened pack of smokes against his chest. She's held the knife that carved the crooked heart into the tree trunk. The referee's whistle. The mickey of gin. The wallet, and the picture in the wallet, and the smile in the picture. The finally unbearable weight of a gun in its holster. Weight of a secret, held in. She's the god of tide pools. Of harmonicas. Marsupials. A mother bounding forty miles an hour through the flatlands, joey leaning out over the edge. She knows the way to a ten-dollar bill tucked in last winter's coat on a flat-broke day in spring—like one more thing that time's forgotten. And on bright days when the swing sets and the iron rails of the monkey bars throw shadows, tall as office towers spreading to the outback, the God of Pockets speaks to children. Run, She says. Take what you can.

To a friend with her daughter, washing dishes

We speak of old age, and put it away again: thought on a string. I sip your good, strong coffee while we joke about our forties as a dress rehearsal. Curtain time ahead! We scare ourselves like kids at movies. How we do exaggerate, the way I do now, convinced that Lynne’s movements are smoother, more supple than yours as you work together at the kitchen sink. And when did her hair become thicker? more auburn? I watch her shoulder blades—a pair of wings could sprout there. And she’s the one best able now to reach the highest shelf. There’s a shift taking place, this is just the beginning, as if something’s draining out of us and into them. Remember how big we were once? We were giants of women. With young daughters riding the curves of our hips, we’d glide through our rooms collecting Mommy’s keys, and Mommy’s wallet. We were Olive Oyl. We were Popeye, too.

*

A shaft of light is falling through your window now and spreads to every surface. There are no clear dilineations, not like in the swimming lessons when the girls were small. The comfort of badges, of lanes. And no bigger miracles, maybe, than this: that we’re talking in the kitchen, still, and our girls nearly grown. And there’ll be no well-marked corridor to old from not old yet—only gradations of light, of heat touching and leaving the skin. But what do I know? sitting here with my coffee where I can still play with an image like this one: that we’re all enrolled in the same dusty classroom, an old-fashioned classroom, early afternoon, lingering odor of paperbag lunches from home, and they’re writing on the blackboard with their backs to us, our large and shining children, and the chalk they’re using used to be our bones.