SILENT GENERATION

 

I remember my mother's silence above all others,

the long unspoken song of it spooling out --

groggy, distant, and inscrutible, yet

as familiar as the Lord's, equally unknowable,

filling every gray room of my childhood,

breathed in like bits of asbestos,

invisible constellations slipped into the pockets

of my coat and carried off to school.

I could not have understood then that this

was the language she was born into,

brought from the old world into the new,

learned and learned again since she could remember,

through instinct and instruction, coming

to know the difference between each

subtle variety -- whether for piety or protection,

for stubbornness, fear, or the blessed forgetfulness

which she so longed for later in life,

forgetting even the names of my brother and me

when she returned from another round of ECT.

How could I know how many sharp edges of

the world she had swallowed, what secret materials

she had gathered in the lockbox of herself,

every day, week, and year of midnights labeled:

"Keep out of reach of children"?

How could I have known so little about the woman

who had given me life, who taught me to pray,

and washed my mouth out with soap

when I took the holy name in vain,

the woman who had scraped herself raw

on the gates of Heaven, only to spiral back into a body,

half-broken, hopelessly mortal, though never

forgetting the light she had left behind.

It would take many years -- long enough for another

generation to grow beside us both -- for her

to find the voice she lost, to speak openly,

unflinching, of unimaginable wounds and the many

names and guises of survival, while the silence

that had been instilled in me trembled,

turned within itself, searching for a single word,

any word, with which to reply.

GHAZAL FOR TRISH

 

There were no half measures with you, no formalities.

You slammed the door to yourself and were gone.

It was always an option for you, I am reminded,

the simple choice between being here or gone.

Some words have sharp edges. We dare not touch.

They insinuate themselves among the silence, never gone.

You wanted only to leave no trace in this world,

as though never here, and therefore never gone.

Grief has made a spare key to the rooms of my life,

walks in daily to remind me that you are gone.

My ghosts travel lightly, as familiar as breath,

though I'm losing track of who's here and who's gone.

In the end, you weighed next to nothing,

your body already a memory before it was gone.

Always a perfectionist, you had practiced, too, for this.

You left a thousand times before you were gone.

ODE TO MESABA CO-OP PARK

 

Back then, there were places where our feet

could not freely walk, where our bodies

could not stand without standing apart from those

some would deem polite society,

our eyes and broken speech giving us away,

patched overalls with a tie on Sunday mornings.

They put up signs: No Indians or Finns Allowed.

They called us Reds, Commies, Jackpine Savages,

called us Barbarians, wearing only our flesh

from sauna to lake shore, steam rising like a thousand

unsettled ghosts, speaking a language full of

closed doors to outsiders, the clicks and

clacks of birds and fallen branches.

Some of us still believed in God, though our sin

was having dared to question the ruling class, dared --

like young Twist -- to humbly ask for more.

But we made our spaces sacred through sweat.

We built a floor on which to dance,

a schoolhouse so our children could learn,

placed our chairs up in the trees, high enough to see

the black sedans of federal agents below,

our minds drifting with the untethered clouds.

Back then, we were dangerous, we were other,

reluctant revolutionaries in this new land,

wanting only to live our quiet working lives.

But sometimes the rabble needs to be roused,

the earth itself shaken from slumber,

the forest called to by name until it answers

in kind, until it invites you as family, and as friend,

its open door leading you gently further in.

VINTAGE

 

I have reached the age when walking into

the local Goodwill feels like nothing so much as

a time capsule of every childhood store

I once wandered, unaccompanied, losing myself among

the latest shoes and clothes, the novelties,

televisions and stereos my family could never

have afforded, days when the mall was a great city

of the mind, and the better half of a day could be lost

thumbing the racks at Great American Music.

I have become, along with my once-youthful peers,

and every generation before us -- vintage,

a word we never would have uttered as kids,

clad in our secondhand polyester pants, creeping

above our ankles, our threadbare sweaters

and enormous collars, nothing ever fitting quite right.

But here are the parachute pants and windbreakers

I once longed for, those white Nike sneakers

with the red logo that all the bratty UMC kids had,

the leather jacket I paid next to nothing for.

I think also of you, my love, how you could always

find something of worth to be reclaimed,

a jumper, a blouse, or dress to mix and match

with something at home, an unexpected pairing,

as perhaps we were all those years ago,

complimenting each other before irrevocably clashing.

I think of the racks of cotton and rayon removed

from your closets, faux fur and pencil skirts,

baubles, beads, and broaches packed up and driven

from your empty apartment to the thrift store.

I see some things you might have liked,

but I'm not buying, just passing through today,

having run this last errand on your behalf,

the bright January sun offering precious little

warmth, casting its unwavering glare in my rearview.

PRESENCE

 

Everywhere I look, you

are not there.

Yet when I cease

all looking, you

appear, as clear and

undeniable

as your absence.

YOUR OBITUARY

I am reading your obituary, calmly, by lamplight,

as if it were merely a poem I came across

in these old papers -- not the mundane list of facts,

dates, and names of survivors which we have

cobbled together on your behalf, and of which

you would most certainly disapprove --

but the one you wrote, long ago, for your

college writing class, when you were so young

and such an exercise must have seemed amusing,

a mere novelty to be redrafted and played with.

In this telling, you have become the survivor

of your own demise, able to alter, delete,

and transform the details of your life, just as you

liked to do when you were in the midst of it.

No one liked a good story more than you.

So, I am reading of your birth across the Atlantic,

how your very identity was kept a secret

before you were sent by steamship to be raised

by film stars deep in the Hollywood hills.

It's a tale you could almost make me believe,

and one that you certainly wished were so.

You are no longer here to say, your narrative lost

among the silence that now becomes a kind

of signature -- everything you have left

out, by choice or chance, or simple forgetfulness,

the once-red ink on brittle pages receding from view.

The ocean hums. Your fiction is safe with me.