Read, read, as fast as you can
is what I want to say but don’t,
for that is what she is already doing
though moving painfully slowly
from word to word as through
something viscous as first
the old woman, then the children,
the horse, the cow, the cat
try to catch the Gingerbread Man.
She is at times a better guesser
than reader, trying
after a peak at the picture
to slip “stove” past me
where the word is “oven.”
When I point to ask if that’s
the word for “stove,”
she snuggles closer, grins,
says, “Daddy, I believe so.”
Sitting on the porch,
we puzzle over morphemes
like two Talmudic scholars,
our reading as labored
as any fundamentalist’s,
so tedious I wonder how
she can be following the plot,
its cookie-against-the-world
conflict, its paranoid’s vision
of enemies everywhere,
its message of inevitable defeat,
leaves in its wake,
of indifference to how
the different suffer.
But she croons each “Stop! Stop!”
knowingly, like a seduction,
shouts melodramatically
the hero’s brash refusals,
laughs at each escape.
She, too, right now,
would like to get away from me,
but tomorrow must deliver to her class
a report about this horrible story
she has been assigned,
and already, seven weeks
into this new school year,
her teacher, who knows
only one way to teach,
and the principal,
who has said he wants no
“special needs” kids in his school,
have given up on her,
are looking for excuses
to get rid of her.
And so we’ll stay here, the book
between us, until the light fails
or we have finished,
although each time anyone
passes on the street,
she must pause to say hello,
to wave and wait for a reply,
which most of the time she gets.
When not, she squints, watching
some jogger or dog-walker pass,
her face screwed up expectantly,
her lips whispering
“hello? hello? hello?”
until I recall her to our task,
encourage her to read more quickly,
enunciate more clearly,
as though by speeding through this book
she might outrun her fate,
as though a good report
will change the principal’s doughy
smile into something real,
as though knowing which letters
spell “oven” will make true
her teacher’s smiling lies
about the school doing all it can.
And so I urge her on
past another foe, the dog
this time, until a clique
of school friends bicycles by
and she must rush to the curb
to call hello. I try
to coax her back, shout
that we’ve just a few pages left,
but she knows how this story ends,
knows all about the fox
on the last page
who will eat the Gingerbread Man
because after all that is exactly
what gingerbread men are made for.
imitating her, imitating
the old woman, the children,
the horse, the cat, the cow,
her teacher, her principal,
wanting to chase and catch her
so we both can run as fast as we can
and cry to everyone we pass
that they can’t catch us.
But I sit, watching the girls
pass by. Each smiles and waves,
but no one stops,
and my daughter stands
a moment longer, arm up,
eyes following, hand moving
in a gesture of greeting
and farewell.