biting back

Biting Back

By Patricia Smith

Children do not grow up

As much as they grow away.

My son’s eyes are stones, flat, brown, fireless,

with no visible openings in or out.

His voice, when he cares to try it on,

hovers one-note in that killing place

where even the blues fidget.

Tight syllables, half spoken, half spat,

greet me with the warmth

of glint-tipped arrows. The air around him

hurts my chest, grows too cold to nourish,

and he stares past me to the open door of his room,

anxious for my patented stumbled restreat.

My fingers used to brush bit of the world

From his kinked hair,

but he moved beyond that mother shine

to whispered “fucks” on the telephone,

to the sweet mysteries of scalloped buttons

dotting the maps of young girls,

to the warped, frustrating truths of algebra,

to anything but me. Ancient, annoying apparatus,

I have unfortunately retained the ability to warm meat,

to open cans, to clean clothing

that has yellowed and stiffened.

I spit money when squeezed,

don’t try to dance in front of his friends,

and know that rap music cannot be stopped.

For these brief flashes of cool, I am tolerated in spurts.

At night I lay in my husband’s arms

and he tells me that these are things that happen,

that the world will tilt again

and our son will return, unannounced, as he was-

goofy and clinging, clever with words, stupefied by rockets.

And I dream on that.

One summer after camp, twelve inches taller than the

summer before,

my child grinned and said,

“Maybe a tree bit me.”

We laughed,

not knowing that was to be his last uttered innocence.

Only months later, eyes would narrow and doors would slam.

Now he is scowl, facial hair, knots of muscle. He is

Pimp, homey, pistol. He is man smell, grimy fingers,

red eyes, rolling dice. He is street, smoke, cocked cannon.

And I sit on his bare mattress after he’s left for school,

wonder at the simple jumble of this motherless world,

look for clues that some gumpopping teenage girl

now wears my face. Full of breastmilk and finger songs,

I stumble the street staring at other children,

gulping my dose of their giggles,

and cursing the trees for their teeth.

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Today my son turned fourteen. Last week, after a particularly hard weekend between the two of us, I opened a poetry anthology to this poem, and knew it to be a gift from Brigid to me, marking my son’s birth. What a year of changes it has been! Sometimes when my son calls me, I don’t recognize his voice. It continues to change, the tone and timber moving at warp speed towards full manhood. I blinked and suddenly he is taller than me. I blinked again, and his dad is suddenly shorter than him. The sweaty child smell I termed “monkeyhead” has wafted away, replaced by the essential aroma of any pro-ball locker room.

I sat on the spectator bench next to my childhood sweetheart today, watching our son (by a series of fortunate events, he is my son’s “biodad”) play basketball. It disturbed me, the stones of his eyes, the intense flat focus devoid of joy and innocence. Jay laughed as I exclaimed “Jeez, can’t he smile occasionally!” He reassured me that it was all totally normal, that what I was seeing was our son’s “game face”. I almost cried thinking on that, the very fact he’s grown old enough now for a “game face”. My son is growing away from me, he’s definitely felt the teeth of the trees. I’m grateful that there still are small moments when world still tilts back, and that I can occasionaly glimpse the boy who was mad for Bugs Bunny and “cozying” with his mother in this tall familiar stranger. How bittersweet the birthday of an adolescent is!