To Maurice Sendak, Who Died And Left Us With The Wild Things

Dear Maurice,

Inside every human

is an oak door with a brass knob.

Behind it, a steady thump-thump.

This is where the wild things are.

The doctors can’t find them,

the children have no words for them,

and the grownups have turned their backs on the door –

but they live,

with their terrible claws and their terrible teeth

and giant yellow eyes.

Children know the wild things.

They fill you up when you’re alone,

gnashing at your insides, showing themselves

when you close your eyes and press on the lids –

before you learn to wear wolfskin,

to stare back,

to shut the door.

You knew, Maurice.

A gay Jew from wartime Brooklyn,

you grew as fast as the mounting pile of ghosts

in your family albums – a small boy,

squinting at death from across the ocean

and feeling it reverberate – thump-thump.

Is it any wonder

that you became our Virgil,

captain of the tiny sailboat,

our guide through the wild rumpus

of heartbeats and short breath and shapes in the dark

to the brass knocker on the island’s shore?

Grownups know where the door lives.

They let it grow over with vines,

tell children it’s only a trellis for bad dreams,

that bad dreams are accidents

that there are no terrible teeth

and no terrible claws.

How terribly we lie, grownups.

But you knew.

And so you took each of us by the hand

and dressed us in another skin,

guiding us into ourselves

up to that door. You couldn’t open it for us.

But you waltzed us to the advancing beat.

thump-thump.

There are wild things inside us.

I want to believe

when you died

the last thing you heard

was the sound of seven billion doorknobs

turning.

with love from the other side,

the children

who grew up

wild