FIRST GENERATION

 

Our grandparents sent long, descriptive letters from across the ocean, while we recited the pledge of allegiance to a flag of forty-eight stars in a one-room schoolhouse, the familiar language of home left at the door, along with the breath-damp wool of scarves and mittens in winter. I am an American now, we were made to recite again and again, and to write it in our notebooks until it became as familiar as our own names, the names which others could not or would not pronounce correctly, and could alter with the stroke of a pen. Our prayers, too, were in English, but only when spoken out loud. Our parents, aunts, and uncles braided the old language with the new, sometimes losing track, beginning again, sometimes inventing a new word where no other could be found. But our silence, in endless variations, was easily understood, neither awkward nor American. It sat as easily as a hammock stretched between two pines, swaying gently from east to west, responsive to the slightest breeze.

EARLIEST MEMORY

The first thing I can remember is water -- not a lake

or river but the rising level of it in the bathtub, the untroubled

sheen of its surface splashing over the lip of porcelain,

below which many imaginary explorers went in search of

new worlds, new creatures, new routes of escape.

I am holding my favorite rubber alligator, the one I will

soon bring with me to foster care. But not just yet.

I have locked the door, but cannot remember

doing so. I can hear voices calling on the other side,

going back and forth, but do not answer.

I like the hum and gurgle of the water. I like the quiet.

But my older sister, convinced that I am drowning,

has scaled the creaking fire escape and kicked in

the window with her flimsy summer sandals, throwing

shards of glass across the smooth tiled floor.

They are like small jewels, aquarium green at their edges;

I want to pick them up and turn them in my hands.

We are fine, but we are both in trouble now.

Though our mother does not stir from the sanctuary of

her television-blue room, the permanent dusk she cultivates,

and does not bother to unlock her door. It is not time

for us to break that door in, its frame dangling

like a broken cross, nails bent downward. Not just yet.

For now, she stays in bed as though tethered there,

drifts in an ocean that is not quite oblivion,

steered by starlight we can neither follow nor understand.

We are fine, we are; but we will be in trouble soon.

ON THE RURAL ROUTE

 

We arrived in the heat-thrum of summer

without warning, two young towheaded aliens from

the land of housing projects and junk yards

commandeered as playgrounds, spent the newly

lengthening days wandering, seeking out box turtles

and toads, garter snakes, plucking fat shining ticks

and the dark tongues of slugs from our sunburned arms

and legs, setting out on small, rickety boats, each

painted a different shade of ever-peeling blue,

puffy orange life vests smelling of must,

of those thick, watery seasons long since passed.

In the winter months, the school bus sometimes

could not get through, and the snowplows were slow

to find us, scraping their stubborn way up that

narrow curve of road to our small scattering

of cabins barely visible, the deep-frozen lake on one

side and the deep hibernating fields on the other,

furrows grown hard as gravestone beneath.

The small black-and-white TV was mostly snow

as well, only one local channel's signal strong enough

to reach our clothes-hanger antenna, giving us

the news we could easily see for ourselves.

The weighted sky hung low, the white earth rising

to meet it, growing closer from all directions,

while all else in the world became hopelessly far away,

our lessons for the day stretched out before us,

waiting to be written, before the early fall of dark.

RITUAL

 

In those days, back in the hills of Tennessee, you knew why

the church bell tolled at an unusual hour of the day,

sometimes signaling with a few short hammer strokes,

sometimes slow and sustained, going on and on,

ringing out once for each year of a life now passed.

Someone had to cover the windows and mirrors,

lest the spirit enter and be trapped inside the glass.

Someone had to edge the stationary in black, and to stop

the clocks, as they had stopped for the departed.

Someone had to wash the body, a sacred rite for the closest

of kin, neither to be hurried nor turned away from.

Someone had to stay up with the body, keeping watch,

wildflowers and juniper masking the smell of decay,

mingling with the warm comfort of constantly brewing coffee.

My mother has not forgotten placing silver dollars

on the eyelids of aunts and uncles, of touching

the hand of the deceased in the belief that it would

remove a blemish, which she says it did. But my mother --

having buried her parents, siblings, and two children

at early ages -- is a lifetime removed from that wide-eyed girl,

and from that sepia-tinted world of front porch songs

and white whiskey, of tobacco leaves on bee stings

and a pair of good overalls for Sunday, a Ball jar of pickled

pig's feet and a can of bacon grease above the stove.

She has requested for herself that there be no ceremony,

no tributes, no songs to be song or scripture read,

and above all, no one gazing upon her body.

Perhaps she is simply removing the trappings of this world

in advance, blotting out the unnecessary, the gaps

in her memory becoming the narrowest of bridges now;

her prayers -- whatever they may hold, in whatever

order recited -- require no words to be lifted.

MY GRANDFATHER'S DAY BOOK

 

Worn and dappled with age, it creaks slightly upon opening, must in its creases, a small narrow door leading immediately into the past. The winding blue script within -- all of it in Finnish -- I can only translate in part, a reminder that language, like memory, can only take us so far. What is left out of this ledger -- this list of dates, facts, and figures -- must write its own story elsewhere. There is no listing for the cost of whiskey and cigarettes, no mention of the son drowned on the other side of the world, nor the wife who followed soon after, no price mentioned for the arsenic that took her. The margins are narrow. There is room only for what he is willing to record, that which makes sense and can be easily measured. I don't know where my own days stand, so many squandered with laziness, the stubborn refusal of youth, so many unaccounted for. I know only that their shadow grows long, no matter which direction I stand. If I am found lacking, grandfather, let these words be a start, let my debt be paid in the telling.

FROM ROOM 104A

 

Overnight, with little warning but a small stitch

turning in your side, and a bit of blood where blood

should not be, you have entered the land of the unwell.

This is the kingdom of white surfaces and sanitizer,

of hushed voices and bedpans clinking, IV stands that

resemble coat racks, and curtains behind curtains,

of paper shot glasses and silent shuffling feet.

You are wheeled from one cool room to another,

quietly and efficiently, the ghost-flicker of ceiling lights

passing like the lines of a highway leading nowhere.

You count backwards. You repeat your name until it sounds

like something foreign, far removed from its source.

You listen, while the faceless man on the other side of

the recovery room coughs and moans all night,

talking, in fitful sleep, to the mother who is not there.

You wonder if your daughter will visit, wonder what day

of the week it might be, and whether you will be

able to write a poem without a window, something

you hadn't realized was essential all this time.

That's where the world is, after all, the one you wish to

return to, in spite of it all; and if it's not exactly new,

or all you had hoped for, it will never be the same

as it was when you left it only days before.

SNAPSHOT FROM MY MOTHER'S WEDDING

 

My brother stands just outside the door frame,

a small coffee cup in hand, while I sit on a folding chair,

thin and lanky in a too-big secondhand suit,

hunched forward, scribbling in a moss-colored notebook.

Neither of us particularly wants to be here -- though

of course we cannot say -- the pastel carnations pinned

to our chests belying our expressionless faces.

Our mother is marrying for the third time -- this time

to a good old boy from south Texas who no one

cares for or trusts more than the weather here in spring.

This was before he spit her name out like a curse,

his hands having become more menace than comfort,

and certainly before he held a shotgun to her head,

threatening to paint the wood-paneled walls with whatever

thoughts and dreams she might have left inside her;

and it's a few years before my brother lifted him

by the neck, dangling like a scarecrow in stocking feet,

eyes popping like buttons, holding him there calmly,

steadily, breathing hard but slowly, until our sister's shouts

convinced him to at last let go, allowing him to fall.

But this is not that moment; this is merely a snapshot

of that young man, having found a quiet corner

for a moment, writing his way towards all he cannot

know, his left hand curling above the page, pale sunlight

filtered from another room, hovering like smoke.