Poetry: Child’s Room in Autumn

ROBERT PINSKY:

Here, for this season of school and football–and also of terror–is Rosanna Warren's poem, "Child's Room in Autumn:"

The scene is about order, the maple tree a conflagration trapped in the rectangle of window, the Newton High football players outside an explosion surging free

of the grip of game and field. And the sky is gray cotton batting pressing down over us, wadded by skilled

hands between branches and rooflines. October wants to ignite. In Benjamin's room, a set of toy soldiers shines

along the shelf, jumble of prancing eras armed with bazookas, crossbows, spears. Tacked to the wall,

a Map of Planet Earth's Disaster Areas shows garlands of volcanoes spilling cherries out

to sea, buttercups for earthquakes, a lime-green swarm of bees the tornado alarm: toy translations of war

sprinkled across the map as though catastrophe were a board game you could win. The room holds peace in a trap

of representations. Ben's at school, the house clenches its calm, the Times softly delivers its daily harm in grisaille blur, but geometrical:

pyramid-hunched, a mother grieves over small bodies arranged in a row; elsewhere, a darkhaired boy stands alone as the last jeep leaves

under a charred, rectangular swatch of sky. The scenes are about suffering, how it lurches out of any picture, giving the lie

to pity, to composition. I sweep Benjy's room, waiting for him to come home, happy with stories: he'll run

out into the autumn field where, now, cheers erupt, helmets are tossed high, and leaves swim down in wild

shoals, gold pennants, streamers loosened to glorify the field, the ephemeral victors, leaving the boughs to the sky.