Childhood's Detritus
by Dale Neibaur, @1984
Pieces of a puzzle in a wooden box
But the lid is gone
No one knows what the pieces make.
Mixed-up colors on an artist's palette board
Dried and flaking now
No one knows what it takes
To make them live again.
Pieces of my living in a tattered book
But the boy is gone
No one knows what he might have been.
Mixed-up notes and hopes and scraps of poetry
Long neglected now;
No one reads all the dreams he carried then
To make them live again.
Pieces of his dreaming are within me yet
But the passion's gone
No one knows what his visions were.
Hopes and hurts and schemings, wild fantasies
Sold so long ago
And I'm really never sure
What he would think of me.
What would he think of me?
[In the early 1980s I was a young father balancing career, family and church demands and doing (I then thought) a rather poor job of it. I was ten years out of high school, and light years from what I'd imagined my life would become. It was so much more, and so much less, than I'd expected that I didn't know how to make sense of it.
In the midst of those feelings, I turned to my journals and my old papers. I made a collection of the best pieces; working late at night I typed them into a primitive CPM-80 computer and then printed the results with a dot matrix printer. It took me perhaps two months to complete the job. After I'd finished, I sent copies to a few dear friends.
Somewhere across the years I've lost my copy, and the old 8" disks the files were stored on have long since been declared useless and tossed into the trash. But Steve still had his copy bound in a green folder stored in his library. When I visited him this past summer on my Harley, he kindly allowed me to take his original copy of that old work; perhaps the only one left. Several of the pieces here have been recovered from that earlier compilation effort.
This poem was written as the frontispiece for that collection.]