A.E. Stallings

Vestiges of games we play in childhood sometimes reappear in our adult lives.

Here’s a poem by A. E. Stallings (born July 2, 1968), American New Formalist and Philhellene poet and translator. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow (the "Genius Grant").

The Doll House

There in the attic of forgotten shapes
(Old coats in plastic, hat boxes, fur capes
Amongst the smells of mothballs and cigars),
I saw the doll house of our early years,
With which my mother and my aunt had played,
And later where my sister and I made
The towering grown-up hours to smile and pass:
The little beds, the tin-foil looking glass,
Bookcases stamped in ink upon the walls,
Mismatched chairs where sat the jointed dolls,
The clock whose face, no larger than a dime,
Had, for all these years, kept the same time.
I remembered how we set the resin food
Atop a table of stained balsa wood,
The shiny turkey hollow to the tap,
The cherry pie baked in a bottle cap.
Now it is time to go to sleep, we spoke,
Parroting the talk of older folk,
And laid the dolls out fully-clothed in bed
After their teeth were brushed, and prayers were said,
And flipped the switch on the low-wattage sun.
But in the night we'd have something break in,
Kidnap the baby or purloin the pie --
A tiger, maybe, or a passer by --
Just to make something happen, to move the story.
The dolls awoke, alarmed, took inventory.
If we made something happen every day,
Or night, it was the game we knew to play,
Not realizing then how lives accrue,
With interest, the smallest things we do.
--A. E. Stallings