CHANGING THE ENDING

 

How many of those old children's tales

have I found myself editing and adding to

while reading to my young daughter?

How many children were spared at the last from

becoming some cretin's favorite meal,

how many kindly animals saved from the axe?

What kind of mother sells her kids to the gypsies?

What kind of father could somehow be talked

into leaving his children alone in the woods,

hungry and terrified, with only the birds

and breadcrumbs to help lead them home?

Even poor Francis, that inquisitive and mischievous

badger, was threatened with a spanking

for failing to fall asleep on command, with me,

grudgingly, having to explain the meaning

of the word, so foreign was the idea in our home.

Things are very different in this telling of ours,

a world apart from that of her father's.

One day, perhaps, she may understand how

I somehow altered my own narrative, and

therefore hers, simply by being the father who

stayed, who chose to do so every moment.

Though there are still many days when I long

to change the story, if only by slowing it down,

pausing before the next turn of the page.

Every small moment has somehow become

my favorite, every adventure the greatest one yet.

I am only beginning to understand, dear reader,

and I confess, I never want this story to end.

A ROLL OF FILM

 

Who knows how many years it lay hidden,

slumbering in that corner of the desk drawer,

framed within its oak walls and shadow,

time slowly unspooling in either direction

around it, the constellations of dust

forming and reforming in a world which

from here must seem only a rumor.

When I retrieved them from the photo shop,

there wasn't much to see -- shapeless

clusters of dark and light merging uneasily,

bursts of summer sun breaking through,

or what might have been a face, or a shoulder,

impossible to distinguish one from the other.

This is the way of all memory, I imagine.

But one image survived to show you,

standing in the doorway, your back turned

to the camera, that long black coat

concealing your frame, Christmas lights

on the tree blurred as if in motion.

I like to think you were smiling, your unshaven

face tilted slightly to one side, half hidden,

your secrets, as always, held closely.

From this distance, it is impossible to tell

if you were leaving or just arriving,

so fitting for you, brother, who could not

stay here long, but waited patiently

until today to pass through once more.

SNAPSHOTS OF MY GRANDPARENTS, CIRCA 1947

 

for Nels and Tyyne Natus

They lean into each other, almost imperceptibly, as two old drunks, long familiar with one another, often will, partly out of love, partly out of habit. They wear neither their Saturday clothes nor their Sunday best, he in plaid farmer's jacket and frayed cap, her hat tilted like a lazy flower to one side of her bronze-tinted hair. Their smiles look slightly weary, as if lacking the energy to rise fully above the surface. But this seems to be a moment on which they could agree -- no arguments here, no shouting in the old language or the new -- years before she chose the arsenic over the simplicity of sunlight, before the cancer carved through him a path which no living thing could ever hope to travel. In this moment, the silence is not pointed but as gentle as the smoke which surrounds them, bringing them somehow closer, their pale eyes narrowed slightly against the light.