We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness.
She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex.
Daughter, where did you get all that goddess?
Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight.
Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her.
Who will her daughter be?
She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness.
I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open.
Her surface is a deflection is why.
Harm on her, harm on us all.
Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.
Browsing category: Family
Saving Nails
I strip the porch roof, pick out the used
nails, and toss the shingles down onto
a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled
my grandmother's roof fifty years ago:
the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and
ladders all the same, but level now
with hemlock limbs instead of locust.
I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel
and drive the old nails home, slide
another shingle into place, pound,
toes bent, knees creaking. Miserliness,
a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it
caring, thinking of the man who gave
us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat-
house full of boats. The only time I saw
him he was at his work bench, a rich
man straightening nails, moving from
the bent can to the anvil to the straight.
Obit
The Blue Dress—died on August 6,
2015, along with the little blue flowers,
all silent. Once the petals looked up.
Now small pieces of dust. I wonder
whether they burned the dress or just
the body? I wonder who lifted her up
into the fire? I wonder if her hair
brushed his cheek before it grew into a
bonfire? I wonder what sound the body
made as it burned? They dyed her hair
for the funeral, too black. She looked
like a comic character. I waited for the
next comic panel, to see the speech
bubble and what she might say. But her
words never came and we were left
with the stillness of blown glass. The
irreversibility of rain. And millions of
little blue flowers. Imagination is having
to live in a dead person’s future. Grief is
wearing a dead person’s dress forever.
Arthritis
“Save your hands,” my mother says,
seeing me untwist a jar’s tight cap—
just the way she used to tell me
not to let boys fool around, or feel
my breasts: “keep them fresh
for marriage,” as if they were a pair
of actual fruit. I scoffed
to think they could bruise, scuff,
soften, rot, wither. I look down now
at my knuckly thumbs, my index finger
permanently askew in the same classic
crook as hers, called a swan’s neck,
as if snapped, it’s that pronounced.
Even as I type, wondering how long
I’ll be able to—each joint in my left hand
needing to be hoisted, prodded, into place,
one knuckle like a clock’s dial clicking
as it’s turned to open, bend or unbend.
I balk at the idea that we can overuse
ourselves, must parcel out and pace
our energies so as not to run out of any
necessary component while still alive—
the definition of “necessary” necessarily
suffering change over time.
The only certainty is uncertainty, I thought
I knew, so ignored whatever she said
about boys and sex: her version of
a story never mine. It made me laugh,
the way she made up traditions, that we
didn’t kiss boys until a certain age, we
didn’t fool around. What we? What part of me
was she? No part I could put my finger on.
How odd, then, one day, to find her
half-napping in her room, talking first
to herself and then to me, about a boy
she used to know, her friend’s brother,
who she kissed, she said, just because
he wanted her to. “Now why would I do that,”
she mused, distraught anew and freshly
stung by the self-betrayal. So much
I still want to do with my hands—
type, play, cook, caress, swipe, re-trace.
Forgiveness
for Dad
I’m writing you
10 years later
& 2,000 miles
Away from
Our silence
My mouth a cave
That had collapsed
I’m writing
While you
You wear the
Hospital gown &
count failures
Such as the body’s
Inability to rise
I see your fingers
Fumbling in the
Pillbox as if
Earthquakes are in
Your hands
I think it’s time
For us to abandon
Our cruelties
For us to speak
So s o f t
We’re barely
Human.
My Mother’s Penmanship Lessons
In her last notes, when her hand began
to tremble, my mother tried to teach it
the penmanship she was known for,
how to make the slanted stems
of the p's and d's, the descending
roundness of the capital m's, the long
loops of the f's crossed at the center,
sending it back again and again
until each message was the same:
a record of her insistence that the hand
return her to the way she was before,
and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.
Once
the father
of my son’s friend
watched his father die.
Then for some reason
came, still grieving,
to a soccer field where I,
a guy he knew,
or kind of knew,
stood with the others
trying not to stare
at the there-
but-for-the-grace-of God–
go-I of him:
his eyes raw-rimmed
behind dark glasses
as herds of little bodies
shrieked and galloped
all around us—
whoever he was before
a trace, a remnant now,
shaking in the gray October wind:
the truth about love, about all of us,
so plain in him
there was nothing left
but to pretend
I was not watching
out the corner of my eye
when the muddy dog,
and the bouncing ball,
and the children
chasing after it
all seemed to veer
and disappear inside him.
A Little Tooth
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
What Changes
My father’s hopes travel with me
years after he died. Someday
we will learn how to live. All of us
surviving without violence
never stop dreaming how to cure it.
What changes? Crossing a small street
in Doha Souk, nut shops shuttered,
a handkerchief lies crumpled in the street,
maroon and white, like one my father had,
from Jordan. Perfectly placed
in his pocket under his smile, for years.
He would have given it to anyone.
How do we continue all these days?
History Lesson
My grandfather left school at fourteen
to work odd jobs until he was old enough
to join his Lithuanian kin chipping
anthracite out of the Pennsylvania hills.
Nine hours a day with five hundred feet
of rock over his head, then an hour’s
ride home on the company bus
to a dinner of boiled cabbage and chicken.
When the second big war broke
he headed “sout,” as he pronounced it,
for better work in the blast furnaces
churning out steel along the shores
of the Chesapeake. Thirty-two years
and half an index finger later he retired
to a brick rancher he built with his own hands
just outside the Baltimore city line.
The spring he got cancer and I got a BA
from a private college we stood under
a tree in his backyard while he copped
a smoke out of my grandmother’s sight.
“Tell me, Pop,” I said, wanting to strike up
a conversation, “how did you like
working in the mills all those years?”
He studied my neatly pressed white shirt,
took a long drag on his cigarette and spit a fleck
of tobacco near my shoes. “Like,” he said,
“didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Red Rover
We take our last walk.
Walls stripped of portraits,
warped mirrors, dressing tables,
and the grandfather clock
with its stoic face
and elaborate gentle fingers.
For years we struggled to break
free of the closeness of rooms,
the obligation of birth order,
the metaphysics that bind
one element to the other,
as if we were still wild girls
playing wild rover in the garden,
breaking through a chain of linked hands.
Chorus
Listen: there are those of us from somewhere else,
the names of birthplaces, of hometowns,
under our skin, tattoos always felt, never seen.
We live here now, though we always meant to leave.
And there are those of us who were born here,
passing the landmarks of our lives so often
we don’t think about them. We never meant to stay.
This place was marked as just for now, as stepping stone,
as temporary on our well-drawn maps.
But for one reason or another, years pass
and we find ourselves hot-stepping with jobs and kids
and this and that and a million little possessions.
Now, the kids say they want to move away. They point
their faces the same directions our faces used to point.
We’ll let them go, of course, knowing more of them
than they think will come back, and that various wayfarers
too will stop for lunch and find themselves
staying for years’ worth of dinners. They will all
find themselves here with the earth spreading
out around them, whispering a welcome
they will be more than a little surprised to hear.
The Guardians
All day we packed boxes.
We read birth and death certificates.
The yellowed telegrams that announced
our births, the cards of congratulations
and condolences, the deeds and debts,
love letters, valentines with a heart
ripped out, the obituaries.
We opened the divorce decree,
a terrible document of division and subtraction.
We leafed through scrapbooks:
corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet,
racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity
parceled in one volume—
painstakingly arranged, preserved
and pasted with crusted glue.
We sat in the room in which the beloved
had departed. We remembered her yellow hair
and her mind free of paradox.
We sat together side by side
on the empty floor and did not speak.
There were no words
between us other than the essence
of the words from the correspondences,
our inheritance—plain speak,
bereft of poetry.
To Boredom
I’m the child of rainy Sundays.
I watched time crawl
Like an injured fly
Over the wet windowpane.
Or waited for a branch
On a tree to stop shaking,
While Grandmother knitted
Making a ball of yarn
Roll over like a kitten at her feet.
I knew every clock in the house
Had stopped ticking
And that this day will last forever.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Falling
I’ve fallen many times:
the usual stumbles
over secret schoolgirl crushes,
head-over-heels for teen heartthrobs.
I loved them all.
I’ve fallen so many times:
tripped down the aisle
over husband, daughter, son.
Madly and deeply,
I love them all.
I’ve fallen again and again:
new friends, a mentor, a muse,
numerous books, a few authors,
four dear pups and a stranger, or two.
I loved them all.
I’ve fallen farther,
fallen faster,
now captivated, I tumble—
enthralled with my grandchildren.
I love them each, ever and all.
\
The New Criticism
My stepdaughter
says I’m boring.
“Everything you say
is boring and like
so seventies.” Her mother
says I’m wonderful, though.
“She’s being fresh. Don’t
listen to her,” she says.
But I can’t help listening
because I want to be
fresh and not boring,
and I want to say ‘like’
like my stepdaughter
because everything
is like something, not
exactly but sort of.
And she’s so contemporary
and provocative and like
alive. She knows all the new
neologisms and would
never use neologism
in a poem. Like ever.
After our Daughter’s Wedding
While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli’s pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
“Do you feel like you’ve given her away?” you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn’t
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.
She wasn’t crushed
under the mammoth wheels of a semi
on highway 17, wasn’t found
lying in the alley
that night after rehearsal
when I got the time wrong.
It’s animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there’s never been a moment
we could count on it.
Brothers at the Reunion
The old men stood below the exit sign
laughing and cussing as though they were
in a well-lit bar—though they’d all
given up drink years before. They cussed
for the electricity of the words. Some, widowers
who hadn’t kissed a woman in years, stroked
the air with their hands. They didn’t touch
one another. The one holdout blew smoke
away from their privacy. They did not talk
of faith—these men whose father had been
a deacon—they disagreed. Instead they told
the old stories about creek beds and whippings
and snakes in mailboxes. And jokes featuring
viagra and gravity. Their laughter bound them,
that and a loss of faith in their bodies,
though desire hammered there still.
My Daughter’s Morning
My daughter’s morning streams
over me like a gang of butterflies
as I, sour-mouthed and not ready
for the accidents I expect
of my day, greet her early:
her sparkle is as the edge of new
ice on leafed pools, while I
am soggy, tepid; old toast.
Yet I am the first version
of later princes; for all my blear
and bluish jowl I am welcomed
as though the plastic bottle
I hold were a torch and
my robe not balding terry.
For her I bring the day; warm
milk, new diaper, escapades;
she lowers all bridges and
sings to me most beautifully
in her own language while
I fumble with safety pins.
I am not made young
by my daughter’s mornings;
I age relentlessly.
Yet I am made to marvel
at the durability of newness
and the beauty of my new one.