“And how wonderful and how impossible would it be to live in a world where no one lost, where no games were competitive, and where anyone who wants a genuine best friend can just get one?”
Stephanie Burt was one of the panelists for the Lab roundtable about games. She shared poems from her collection, We Are Mermaids.
Hobbies
In the Holly Hobbie board game (Parker Brothers, 1976), you move your
dime-shaped token over squares around a brick-walled wishing well and try
to guess secret wishes.
Each secret wish has its own card.
The cards have rounded edges, like standard playing cards scaled down to fit
young hands.
Their style is what you might call extreme Laura Ashley: gathered caps, phlox,
ruffles, Queen Anne’s lace, wicker and gingham, puppies with floppy oversize
ears, penny-farthing bicycles.
Each time a player guesses another player’s secret wish, the player who guessed
correctly can take from the well, or rather from the stack at the square border
of the well, one, two, or three pennies.
The “pennies” are cardstock discs in lemon yellow, the size and shape of a real life
dime. Holly has worked hard to save them, but we know she does not need
to earn a living. That’s what makes her Holly Hobbie.
You can use pennies to buy your own wish.
Some wishes are a Letter, a Swing, a Parade. Other wishes are a Birthday Party,
a Beach Day, a Horse, and My Own Desk.
None of the wishes involve survival, or safety, or ambition, or competition.
You can also wish for a Best Friend.
Each player represents a different child: one has fine blond hair, another black
curls in ribbons. One wears a romper, another a smock dress. Two wear overalls.
Not all the children are white, though the board is.
The adults are out of the picture, perhaps at work, or taking care of younger
children.
The only disappointment comes on the face of the cat on the card whose wish
is Lots of Kittens; she looks sad to see the eponymous basket of kittens (one
black, two orange, the rest mottled or striped) taken from her by a girl (Holly
Hobbie) who has trouble lifting them all.
Holly will feed them all milk, slowly, from her glass bottle.
You can pay with pennies for answers to any question, as long as the answer
belongs in the game.
The back of each card shows a figure in pastels: a child in a mob cap, a plaid
dress, and spring-weight boots, holding sprigs of mallows (the flower, not the
dessert).
Each card repeats a slogan in art nouveau font:
Red, Yellow, Green and Blue,
May Your Wishes All Come True.
Thank you, cocreator or uncredited maker of work for hire. Yours too.
?
Sligo Town
This small child at a travellers’ halting site
(in American: trailer park)
chose to arrange
two-dozen-odd slabs of cracked asphalt,
each about the size of a housecat,
so that
they made a straight path, then veered up to the property line
in the shape of a giant, crumbling question mark.
Anything, given time, can become a fine
art. Anything can turn over, or decline,
or break, or come back together, or simply change.
Put that in your model museum. Put that in your vault.
Love Poem with a Roll on Its Side
What if you really had never heard it before?
The throaty voice, the credibility
And strength of a man who could always pick you up
And bring you to that one place and keep you there
And never abandon you, who would move only slowly
And never in circles, a man who would hold your hand
Gently and yet unrelentingly, whose very
Hairline crept up to a heart-shaped peak
Whose gentle curves matched black-tea-colored eyes
And as-if-penciled brows, so that those farewell-free,
As-long-as-you-need-me tones of reassurance
In him and him alone could be believed. There is so little
On this Earth you can trust, so little that comes around
And never goes away, but we will always
Have this gem, this constant
Companion, this life preserver whose love is a promise
You should have seen coming: he is, indeed, never
Gonna give you up, never gonna let
You down, never gonna run
Around and desert you.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Advice from the Lights, Belmont, Close Calls with Nonsense, The Poem Is You, and We Are Mermaids.