Your mother came down through
Roger Williams, then the colonial governors.
Your father’s people were likewise
venerable but of more dubious luster.
These good folk quietly withdrew
from their rooms every time I entered.
Lucky for them in the name of civility,
this East Side address was laid out for leave-taking.
They never said a word to me,
though I slept with their son
on their third floor, bathed in their clawfoot tub,
and helped eat what little food there was.
Oh there must have been an orgy
of scrubbing and tidying each time I left;
because it truly pained them to have me around,
as if the intentions of an entire race
had gone awry, as if everything
were happening for the first time,
as if gravity had become
impossibly virulent on some streets,
while on others, people and objects took flight.
Only now can I confess that
the anthropologist-in-Samoa aspect of your terrain detained me
long after your pale gentility palled.
No coming of age sacrament, in any
hemisphere, could have bestowed on me
the power I held in that house.