In a note to me my friend Richard forged a surprising yet cogent connection between the Corso scrap I gave you yesterday--"it does tell me my soul has a shadow"--and this familiar gem, which, like Richard, I once knew by heart and used to repeat to myself while I skipped rope round and round the apartment complex where we lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, long ago in the days when I was five years old and my dad spent all day long writing his dissertation and my three-year-old sister encountered insect trouble.

My Shadow

Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes get so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.


Silver Spring, Maryland, 1969

Dawn Potter

In dreams, strange men steal cats from me.

Every morning I walk to school.
My teacher, Miss Sayford, wears white boots.
She is more beautiful than a princess.
Boys place "Lost in Space,"
and girls are lost also.

At home I jump rope
up and down the sidewalk
that loops like a horseshoe
around the dirt yard by the apartment,
where the crab tree grows,

where the bee is, before it stings.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems, Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]