Breadcrumbs

(for the latchkey kids of our city) 

Now who will tell the children fairytales? the ones where simple crumbs over the forest floor endure to help us home. 
—Jorie Graham 

The fairytales were wrong: 
to identify big feet 
with wicked stepsisters, ugly with unloved, 
princes and frogs with anything 
but world news and the bog by the river. 
Ducklings grow into ducks, 
a beauty set apart from swans. 

Still, I cannot think of childhood 
without my mother’s voice unraveling tales: 
“There was a bear 
whose name was Jim. 
Children weren’t afraid of him ” 
Whether ironing clothes or bottling fruit, 
her words moved with her work— 
their steady rhythm drawn 
into repetition as we begged for more— 

and in the end were stored up with sleek jars 
of cherries where a shaft of light made them glisten 
like jewels I reached to touch 
again and again. 
And I took for granted coming home 
to the yeasty smells of rising bread 
and my mother so in place there.

Today in a grey winter light 
I drove toward home through rush-hour traffic:
street upon street of darkening houses,
drapes unclosed, a faint flicker 
of blue from each window . . . again and again
the curved glass of screens 
that sell us our stories.