UNCLE WILLARD

 

Uncle Willard's hands were shaped much like

my mother's, though larger, with flat-tipped fingers

able to reach and find what my mother called

those fancy chords on the neck of his red guitar,

hollow-bodied -- a box, some players called it --

beautiful and mysterious to the eyes of a young child,

too shy to sing but eager to gather those secrets.

He'd come by on Saturdays, or Sunday after church,

to our place in the housing projects, asking

if she wanted to do some picking, over coffee,

knowing already that she did -- of course she did.

It was only later, much later, that my mother

told me how he had made the trip to the hospital

when I was born, after Dr. Sergeant -- the man

who had delivered her other four babies

and remembered them all by name -- told her

that I was dying, unable to gather and hold

enough oxygen, that I would not last the night.

He arrived, mom said, well past visiting hours, with

his guitar, and his worn and annotated Bible,

anointed my head with oil -- for he was a preacher

as much as a player -- reading passages of scripture,

praying the long autumn hours into morning;

and I am sorry now that I did not speak to him of

this during his lifetime; I am sorry that I have waited

all these years -- decades of unintended silence --

simply to thank him for drawing from my small lips

those first few gasping attempts at song.

CEMETERY GRASS

 

I remember, too, you brushing your hair

in the morning, never gently, but with a quiet

vengeance, as one would rake a field

full of fallen leaves. I imagined, still half asleep,

the sound of claws digging through

deep undergrowth, sparks of electricity

thrown this way and that, lightning flashing

with your frustration below the surface.

"I'm a hag!," you would call out,

and on a good day you would be laughing,

throwing that calico brush to the floor

like a weapon no longer of use.

But I loved your hair, thick and stubborn

its springs and tendrils always reaching upward,

shining like sunlight through whiskey,

threads of silver arriving much too early

for your liking. You said they were your ghosts

returning to have their say, too many

forgotten lives for you to keep track of.

Now, I dress for an early autumn, no matter

the weather, a far cry from the young man

you once loved; and you have become

another ghost to walk beside me, stirring

the trees, brushing the clouds aside as easily

as spider web, curtains, or breath.

SPARRING

 

My young hands are slow, hopelessly so, hardly

equipped for the instinctual jab and reach

required for this dance; my flat feet, likewise, reluctant

to lift themselves from the cool kitchen linoleum.

This is as close as we will get to an embrace,

my brother and I, the palms of his hands held out

toward me, waving, circling, shifting the air between us,

hands which look like larger versions of my own.

Still in high school, he proudly wears his silver satin

jacket from the White Bear Lake Boxing Club,

the rust-colored spatters of blood, who knows whose,

along its front and arms a badge of honor.

"Protect your head," he reminds me, repeating it,

having twice had his own nose broken of late.

This is the true gospel he is preaching,

fire and brimstone in each of his teenage fists,

where all of his sorrow, anger, and betrayal entwine,

speaking with blunt certainty all that he cannot;

and though I flinch, I know that he would not hit me

in the face, not intentionally, but merely brushes

against my cheek slightly, delicately, my periphery

catching only the blur of sudden motion, of autumn light

shifting through the broken branches of trees,

the movement of human or animal already gone,

just to show that he can, just to remind me

how quickly things can come at you in this life,

and how quickly they can all just disappear.

CIRCLE ROUTES

 

The Canada geese this morning

are plodding in weary circles

along the side of the road,

one after the other, waiting for

this gray Autumn rain to lift

to begin their long flight

back to where they started from.

A SUDDEN DOWNPOUR

 

The sky opens without warning, as it will

this time of year, while a woman races across

the parking lot of a local department store,

weighted bags on either shoulder, her two

young children holding up the hem of her long

summer dress as though it were a tent.

I can hear the lilt of their voices rising

to meet their mother's, hear the wet slapping

of their flip-flops against the pavement;

and I can hear their laughter ringing out

between words, a sound that is easily understood

in any language, welcoming this sudden storm.

This is only rain, after all, not the hot metal

of bombs, no more to be feared than the sound

of their breathing or names spoken aloud.

For now, their mother keeps the sky away.

For now, this is all the shelter they will need.

FIRST GRADE

 

The autumn moved in seemingly overnight,

its gray and watery chill seeping through

the windows while we slept. Suddenly,

the glittering Ferris wheel of the State Fair

has stopped for yet another year,

the green of lawns and hills grows less certain,

the leaves already folding in on themselves

like small hands clutching at the air;

and we stand, my daughter, her mother,

and me, in the hallway of this new school,

the light strangely familiar, as though bottled

from decades past and just opened again.

Our daughter is smiling but nervous,

her suntanned arms at her sides as she turns

with uncertainty, chin held tightly against her chest,

as if trying to find a doorway into herself.

But she turns instead toward this classroom,

her backpack comically large, her bag of supplies

so heavy that she pulls it at her side;

and we, her parents, turn with the ringing

of the bell, so startling in its insistence,

to leave, as ever, in our separate directions.

But of course we, too, are being pulled

forward, together, into all that we could not

have planned, the beauty, the boredom,

and wonder of this great unknown.

FEATHERS OF A DOVE

 

How many trips did we make back then

to the hardware store, as summer

leaned lazily into autumn; how many

dusky shades of blue and gray

holding their secret oceans of light

were mixed on our behalf, a seemingly

endless variety of color swatches

laid out like narrow, unframed windows,

opening onto a bright coastal morning

which no artist could ever have gotten right?

How elegant and whimsical their names,

dreamed up, I imagine, in some drab

and lifeless boardroom, and labeled here

in practiced script: English Chamomile,

Whispering Mist, Feathers of a Dove.

We read them aloud just to hear their music,

the unassuming romance they promised,

the time we longed for most of all.

How many thoughtless brushstrokes

covered the wall at the end of that narrow

hallway, as if the smallest of decisions

could make all the difference for us?

How many weeks before the baby arrived

to parents who could not agree

even on this, our days together already

beginning to flutter from our grasp, restless

and unfinished, all but flying away?

RASPBERRIES IN NOVEMBER

 

Walking my daughter home from school,

the autumnal sun clear and bright

all around us -- though the wind is sharp,

undeniable, an uninvited guest looking

for a vacant place to settle in.

We stop to pick the few remaining

raspberries along the way. They are cool

to the touch, trembling slightly,

tiny pistils of hair standing upright

on their flesh, offering back to us the rain,

sun, and soil of the season's passing.

She picks one, and places it in my hand,

while I reach for two more at the top,

placing them into her palms one at a time.

Sweetness offered, and sweetness

returned, I think to myself. So simple.

"This is the best raspberry that I've ever

tasted in my life," she exclaims.

She has said as much more than twice

over the summer. You would be forgiven

for thinking it mere exaggeration,

a childish excitement, but I'm quite certain

that it has been true each time,

as it is here and now. For both of us.

MUSIC BOX

 

My daughter turns the match-thin handle

of the music box, its tiny metal teeth

plucking out "Love Me Tender"

with the bright clarity of a child's lullaby,

slowing and increasing the tempo

of this tune she has learned this way,

its simple notes rising and falling

from her steady outstretched palm.

When I was her age, my older brother

and I rode in the back of a sweltering hot

station wagon while a calm and serious voice

broke through the radio announcing

that Elvis Presley, a man who seemed

to me to be from another planet, had died

suddenly, at his home in Memphis.

Death was a gray and mysterious thing;

but I knew that it meant an absence,

a silence which no one came back from.

Yet music lives upon air, much longer

than breath alone, writing and rewriting

itself at will -- and here it is again

on this most ordinary day in autumn,

dry leaves tapping at the window glass;

a day made all the more lovely by its brevity,

and because we are here to speak of it.

Which is to say that there is no need

for the saying, no need at all. This song,

however small, will do just fine.

SCATTERED

 

So many different rains tonight,

their slender gray thoughts

scattered everywhere at once.

Perhaps the wind can somehow

bring these factions together;

perhaps by morning a consensus

may at last be reached.

WINTERIZING

 

My brother and I pulled the old ladder

from the loft of that damp, falling-down garage,

snapped the cold and grimy storm windows

into place one by one, our mother imploring us

from the earth below not to break our necks,

not to touch our fingers to those jagged

pieces not yet repaired, broken by flying balls

or an elbow thrown back in defense.

We caulked up the wind-trembling cracks,

closed off the uninsulated storage room,

hoisted great, thick sheets of plastic

over anything else left facing the light.

A new silence took root inside each room,

everything suddenly nearer, muffled.

Sometimes I imagined those sheets to be

sails, as if we were about to set forth

to a world that we could not yet fathom.

But only the darkened edges of trees

shook themselves occasionally, the vague

shapes of winter bodies passing outside.

You had to have faith that something out there

was being created, something both startling

and familiar coming back into focus,

so slowly, so tentatively that none of us

would have noticed, or bothered to say so.