Classic Poem

Childhood is a nicked black trunk
you move when you move, from attics
to basements, storage shed, crawl space,
walk-in closet. When they were in
their sixties and their mother in
her eighties, they said to her, We
are miserable, our childhoods
were miserable. And their mother?

Oldest of seventeen, four years
of school, Nothing Soup — raw milk, salt,
pepper, flour — spring snow sparking
through the wallboards, her first child

at fifteen. Childhood is a nicked
trunk you don't have to look inside
to remember. Blasted lining,
the smell of nickels. Childhood, let

it be long ago, like glaciers.