You swing on a swing that is not a swing —
inhale time: familiar
old lady scent, bouquet of urine and rose.
Auntie Sima who survived multiple pogroms
loves to play Hi-Q with you —
glides in a country of her own making.
Happiness sobs on a porch after Sunday
dinner. Our address printed in America now.
At four, you’ve perfected leisure: this place of summer
and windows open to the pageant of sky —
which someone calls a metaphor. What is a metaphor?
What is memory of a glider on a sunporch on Summit Avenue?
The machinery creaks and caws, pulls you back
to Russian soldiers breaking down village doors.
Here, next door the Mazor boys live upstairs
and my dad knows the name of the Empress of Ice Cream
playing Sugar — Sugar, Sugar! from a truck painted in flying cones.
Auntie Sima studies the board’s pegs set in a yellow star —
a new move each time the glider rolls back
and forth. I win! I win! she yells to the grind
of wheels — metal on metal confirming the family news —
right here in this city’s immigrants — Aunt Sima,
Sarah, & Emma glide in the bright laughter
of the Christian couple downstairs, in the taste of a swirled rocket.
You observe more worlds than you imagine
all at once in a swing of time.
Click here to read Susan Rich on the origin of the poem.
Image by Mark Wordy on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Susan Rich:
Did you know a glider is very different from a porch swing? (This is something AI cannot understand.) If you look closely at this periwinkle blue glider you can just make out metal legs that slide into parallel tracks. The right one closest to the house is easiest to see. As a child, my family had one on our porch that glided back and forth either from me jumping on it or the adults in the family moving their feet. There are no chains or ropes to contend with. At three years old, I was sure it was magically moving. And each glide forward or backward a cause for celebration.
I’m drawn to the near magical quality of bringing an inanimate thing to life. Hence, this object poem. In “Porch Swing,” I wanted a physicality that conveyed a sense of time travel. A mechanism made for movement, like a clock but not a clock. The porch glider in our sunporch on Allston Street in Brighton, where I lived until I was almost four, literally appeared in my mind. Red, white, and grey plastic upholstery. A reliable, rhythmic squawk. Was it one Sunday when we gathered there to play HiQ or was this a weekly occurrence? I remember I felt extremely grown up because my great aunt chose me (the youngest child) to challenge to a game. An aunt who would sometimes mutter to herself about shiksas or goys downstairs, whoever they were.
I attempted to have the poem exist in three time periods: the past/present Sunday afternoon of a nearly four-year-old child, the great aunt’s memories of pogroms in the old country, and a future tense of the speaker remembering this day. Perhaps it’s worth noting (although the poem doesn’t say it) that everyone in the room except the child is now long dead.
The form of the poem: a couplet followed by a monostich attempts to mimic the swing and pause of the glider; the impossible push and pull of time.
Susan Rich is the author of nine books including Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds; Blue Atlas; and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. Her poetry appears in the Harvard Review, New England Review, Ploughshares and elsewhere. Susan’s 7th book of poems, A Compass or A Companion, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
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