the other night, while I was putting maggie to bed

the other night, while I was putting maggie to bed,

she had to go downstairs to go to the bathroom,

so I set aside swallows and amazons

and lay back and stared at the ceiling.

I exhaled, savoring that rare

interstice between obligations,

and absentmindedly took in what I saw above me:

the three dimensional constellation

of wire-and-white-paper party lights,

strung up there after last summer’s outside adult soirée,

illuminating everything with a syncopated golden glow

like ragtime music for the eyes;

the congealed shaving cream blob

on a sheet of blue construction paper

that was meant to depict a cloud when she made it in class,

but that, in this context, looks like another one of

those white paper balls that has failed to light;

several drawings that she did at home,

including a cut-out one of our cat hubble

that she colored in with fading black marker for the body

and pink for the triangle ears and the cave-like mouth-nose area;

four different dog stickers that she got at either

the doctor’s or dentist’s office a long time ago;

going even further back, the hanging recycled cd fish

that was a kindergarten art project that I oversaw

last year, ineptly but safely wielding the glue gun

at an alice-in-wonderland-sized table

while five year-olds crowded my elbows;

also dangling from a thread, a barely three dimensional

pink cat head, a part of a paper toy mobile set

whose lower body is supposed to fit into the upper

with two stiff flanges, but which has fallen away,

yet again, into the detritus on maggie’s floor;

a poster for the lego movie that we got for free

after we saw it in the theater,

depicting not the characters, but just

the title being lifted up by a construction crane;

the big wooden M hanging on a thumbtack

above the light switch, one of a dozen presents

her california grandparents sent in a box for some holiday,

that she painted green and purple

and then later adorned with the red and yellow

pipe-cleaner-and-tissue-paper flower she made

with her mother in the tacoma art museum’s kids’ studio

during its chaotic dia de los muertos celebration;

a tacked-up headshot of twilight sparkle

that an illustrator for the my little pony comic book

drew for her at last year’s children’s museum comic book day;

freckles of tiny stickers everywhere, of flowers and butterflies

and disney princesses and cats and cupcakes, but also of

trucks and planes and boats, since these were all probably

pulled off of little sheets we put in goody bags

for one of our kids’ birthday parties, and she’s indiscriminate

when it comes to grabbing and making use of that kind of stuff;

and, under everything, the horizontal wooden planking

comprising the walls and ceiling, painted white,

yet whose flush-lines’ shadows give this room the subtle look

of a box made of college-ruled writing paper.

in the moments before maggie returned,

as the cd player churned out sotto voce piano-only “frere jacques”

and I took all this in, I had a simple but powerful revelation.

“I’m in her childhood,” I thought.

I wasn’t just thinking of the literal location I was studying,

but also, more broadly, of the era of her life it represents.

if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t pretend I could change anything

and go back to nazi germany or 1963 dallas or any place like that;

no, it’s probably no surprise to learn that I would go back

and watch my own childhood roll out exactly as it did.

I can’t do that, of course, yet here I am, like a traveler

from the future, inserted into someone else’s childhood.

while everything else in the world pushes us toward “letting go,”

as in the title of the philip roth novel I’ve long meant to reread,

it is the poet’s job to do the opposite.

but that which we can hold onto the tightest, it turns out,

is that over which we can hold no authoritative claim.