It’s always followed me, this blimp,
drawing the evening colors
across the sky. It’s followed me
since childhood, when I looked up
into the clear blue sky
and saw it, fat with helium,
advertising real estate. In the afternoons
when I was sick and home from school
and read aloud in the gray shade
of a window, it leaned in,
listening, taking pictures
to develop on its return
to the skyport, where alien beings
would crawl out on the dock of a cloud
and speak their strange computer language
or read each others’ minds. It followed me
to foreign cities, the ruins of a pyramid,
scaling placidly
the thousand stories of the world’s tallest
building, observing board meetings
with incredibly powerful binoculars. It saw me once
on the toilet, face contorted in shame
when I got my first period
and stained the oriental rug. It watched me
losing my virginity
to the boy across the street, the pastor’s
son, it caught us in mid-act; the tiny camera
seemed almost to laugh: how small,
how pathetic, this thing that humans do. And now
I still see it above the train-set town, lower
than any plane, and filled no longer with gas
but a dim pride in detachment, meaning
a secret kind of longing.

A gaudy piece at the center
of the mall, reproduction
of a reproduction, interpretation of an
interpretation of the eighteenth century,
with Triton on an outsized shell
drawn by dolphins, and cherubs
clutching their wrought-iron penises, the fountain
is more a stage set for pre-teen girls
talking about boys and clothes and hair,
making fun of the losers
who still wear Keds and go shopping
with their moms. The water from the dolphins’ mouths
isn’t really water; its flow is sedulous,
almost gelatinous, like actors’ tears. When the girls
look into the basin it isn’t their faces
that they see, or even a reflection;
it’s something else, something intermediary, neither real
nor unreal, with its own weight and texture,
its own special properties and rules
it must adhere to, like the girls, twelve
going on thirteen. Neither children
nor adults, they look down at their hands,
chip the black polish off their nails.

Twelve, Going on Thirteen

The summer after sixth grade we put away
our dolls. We thought we’d miss them, but as it happened
we got involved in this mysterious new grown-up thing
called “hanging out”—a group of us would sit around
the school commons or the fountain at the mall, talking
about boys and clothes and hair, criticizing the losers
who still wore Keds and went shopping
with their moms. Whenever the conversation dried up,
we’d look down at our hands, and chip away
our black nail polish, or take quizzes in YM
and Seventeen to learn our kissing style
or what hot new veejay’s taste in music
was closest to our own. Piano music
from a department store mixed with the clatter
of the fountain and smell of pretzels at Auntie Anne’s.

Each of us secretly wanted to be that girl
in her leggings and passé tennis shoes
holding her mother’s hand; we wanted our mom’s approval
as we tried on outfits; we wanted her to tell us
that a top was too low-cut or that a tight pair of jeans
made our ass look like a hooker’s. None of us
had a curfew; our mothers were at home
with our younger siblings, watching soap operas
and losing track of time. There were no cell phones yet,
and most of us had forgotten quarters
to call home at the payphone by the ladies’ room. We didn’t notice
when the sun set and it grew dark outside
and the music of the fountain grew darker also.