Anna

A tender recollection of being six, where childhood becomes a moment of first thought and first proportion rather than simple innocence.

'Anna' recovers a grandmother's teaching that 'being six was the best', framed as a doctrine the speaker received rather than discovered: six is 'the first time, / you really think'. The poem registers the change cosmically - 'The Moon and the stars are / different now since you / are six' - and notes that what once 'moved / very fast' and even frightening now slows enough to 'have you think'. It ends on a closed circle of memory: 'Six is a wonder; how this good thing happens? / Only those who remember six / would know'.

The title gives the grandmother (presumably Anna) a name while the poem keeps her authority anonymous and oracular, so the piece is really about transmission - thought as something handed down at a specific age rather than developed on one's own. The insistent return of 'being six' works less as incantation than as the careful holding of a doctrine, the speaker repeating a phrase to keep its exact shape. What makes the poem more than nostalgia is its quiet epistemology: the frightening speed of early childhood resolves at six into the capacity to reflect, and the reward is immediately cosmic - the moon and stars look 'different' to a mind that has just begun to think. The closing 'Only those who remember six / would know' seals the experience inside memory, making the poem a small initiation that can be described but not transferred. Placed in 'In Part Between Sinatra and Christ', it offers a secular threshold of awakening, a worldly first communion of consciousness.