NAMES

 

My daughter's name was discovered by

her mother in a crowded bookstore,

as though it had already been

spoken for years, her middle name

crooned over the car radio

en route to the hospital through

a fresh dusting of December snow.

Some of our ancestors had names that

were changed and changed again,

anglicized by those who claimed

to know best, while others were deemed

unworthy to be recorded at all.

My aunt gave names to her stillborn,

keeping their sacredness to herself,

while our mother taught my brother

and I that our names were known

to the angels, and could be removed

from the Book of Life if we lied or

took the Lord's name in vain.

I thought of this whenever I wrote

in my Big Chief notebook, or read from

my children's Bible, as I thought of

my earthly father, who too remained

faceless, refusing me the family name.

But today, the winter solstice just

behind us, I can hear the gentle swelling

of choral music from the next room --

something that could only be

expressed in Latin, voices so light and airy they can only rise -- as my daughter

calls out one request or another

that I can't quite make out.

But, of course, I answer; I answer

without hesitation, as if this too were

a kind of song I stumbled into,

and must somehow learn on the spot.

MY MOTHER'S SAINT PAUL

 

Before my mother moved to the other side

of the country, leaving only her guitar for safekeeping,

she wanted to drive the city one last time,

to claim and to remember, startling me with

a sudden and unbidden openness,

I had never in my life witnessed from her.

She drove slowly, intentionally so, in that big white boat

of a car, down University Avenue, a street

we never ventured near as kids, nothing but

adult bookstores, porn theaters, and seedy bars.

We heard stories, locked the car doors when riding past.

Those old ghosts were gone now, along with

the small honky tonks she once played, underage,

the low-tiled ceilings yellow with smoke,

barely tall enough to accommodate an upright bass.

We rounded the smooth asphalt encircling Como Lake,

the zoo just up the hill, the same trickling waterfall

where as kids we were chased off by security.

The White Castle where she worked as a teenager

was still serving up greasy sliders with onions,

and the baseball diamond at Mechanical Arts school

where she played with the boys after school

looked very much the same to her eyes.

She speaks, lastly, of the childhood home

that never quite was, the collective nightmare

that she and her sisters somehow survived.

What does it mean, I wondered, retracing the maps

of our past, searching for structure, for patterns,

a road back that might in turn lead safely out?

We want, if nothing else, a narrative that makes sense.

This is the house where she learned to play,

she says, practicing for hours until her fingers bled,

and this is where she first saw snow falling

at the age of six, running outside in audible wonder,

this skinny girl from the hollers of Tennessee,

looking up and up, tasting each frozen star

upon her tongue, so cold they startled each time,

their small light disappearing on contact.

TOBACCO

 

I never took up the family habit of smoking,

as my grandfathers did, both of them eaten away

by cancer -- or my grandmother Artie,

who spit that bug-colored juice into a milk jug

just off to the side of the open porch,

as discretely as one could manage, not wanting

the world to know that she chewed the stuff.

But when my mother was a girl of five

or six, she reminds me, she was startled and stung

by a wasp, and her blonde, skinny arm began

to balloon, her breathing soon reduced

to a labored wheeze, the blue sky wheeling

and the dark earth pulling its door

open beneath her, she remembers her uncles

running gangly-limbed out to the field

to snatch a few green and fragrant leaves,

dowsing them with well water and wrapping them,

gently, around her red and swollen skin.

"It must have worked," she smiled softly, her eyes

grown distant and wistful in her remembering,

"Because here I am." Did she mean merely

that we make do with the remedy we have on hand,

or that one poison sometimes erases another?

Some lessons, perhaps, are lost on a son

born and raised in the frozen north.

But I can kiss and wrap a wound, I can run

when my daughter is on the cusp of falling, or edges

too close toward the oncoming traffic.

We are both, to our occasional and mutual

wonder, stronger and faster than we could have

imagined only moments before.

MY DAUGHTER SPEAKS OF BIRDS

 

My daughter speaks of birds, speaks in wonder

of their sing-song call and response,

their endless reserve of resilience and guile

in the face of all manner of adversity,

the sudden and startling grace of their flight,

which, after all this time, continues to

amaze those of us standing

flat-footed on the earth below.

She asks which bird I might come back as

after I have departed from this life,

and how she will know it's me.

"Fly close to me three times," she suggests,

"then give out one call." This seems

a reasonable request, provided my new

bird-self can remember the details.

Our ancestors, after all, believed that

the soul was carried in, and away,

on the wings of the sielulintu,

that the whole of earth and sky were formed

from the broken shell of a fallen egg.

We settle, for now, upon a common jay,

brightly handsome but unassuming,

vigilant in watching over its family, never

straying far from its wooded home.

We have, I hope, the better part of this life

to draw our fragile maps,

perfect our signals, our language

of mutual understanding.

SENSITIVE

 

I have never wanted for you, dearest daughter,

to be anything other than the beautiful and sensitive

soul you have always been, collecting oak seeds

to watch them spin back down to earth,

those long-stemmed dandelions bent over, as if in prayer,

deciphering the forms of strange new animals

among the clouds, where the ancestors sleep,

faces smiling back from the most ordinary of stone.

I have admired, as an outsider, the special language

you share with birds and trees, how the cats

in the neighborhood all come to you, unafraid,

knowing you already, and how you mourned deeply

the death of your beta fish, the one you called

your sister and confided your worries to.

I have heard you choosing each word for a poem

or song, tapping them against the roof

of your mouth, letting the new sounds settle,

until they filled your ears as perfectly as the silence,

watched you conduct, with arms gently waving,

a string concerto constructed in your mind;

and when bullies have thrown their sharpened words

like so many stones, I have sat within your sorrow,

unable to offer an answer as to why some, young

or old, simply enjoy the act of causing harm.

These are the times when I want nothing more than to

protect you from the inclement elements of self,

the ever-shifting atmosphere of your inner world

overwhelming you, to close, temporarily, the windows

against the sudden rain of summer, until the sun

again finds its way, small enough to tuck into

your pocket like a coin, thin and hot to the touch,

rubbed smooth at the center, reflecting.

CARRYING MY DAUGHTER TO BED

 

My daughter, so proud lately of her lengthening limbs

and muscles, still asks, on most evenings,

to be carried to bed, which -- amazingly, though

with no small effort -- I am still able to do.

Long gone are the days of lifting her with ease,

as though moving one of my own limbs,

absentmindedly, up or down, gone now the special hold

I somehow stumbled upon when her wailing --

as if the entire anguish of the world had

been condensed into one elongated vowel --

simply could not be consoled, her small and fragile

body held out before me, head resting snugly

in the palm of my hand, her torso fitting perfectly

into my forearm, her flat and skinny feet,

not yet having touched upon earth

or grass, reaching out into the air, unafraid,

and we swayed that way, gently, almost imperceptibly,

upon the kitchen linoleum, until her cries

drifted slowly into coos and gurgles, and at last

into the welcome silence of sleep.

Tonight, I carry her down the narrow hallway,

turning sideways, and with little grace on my part,

dropping her into the soft familiarity of

bedsheets and blankets that bear her fragrance,

her shape still faintly visible from the night before,

where she will drift again into weightlessness,

her body building itself even when she

is seemingly gone, as the map behind her eyelids,

the one only she can read, draws her

forward, relentlessly forward.

DANDELIONS

 

Perhaps I have been too hard on the housing projects of my earliest years, as if they were merely prisons to be endured. We had yards, after all, as Louie Anderson reminded me. We had clean water and our own rooms, we had a washer and a dryer, and windows which kept out the winter air. We didn't even remember that we were trash, until someone at school reminded us. I learned to play soccer, albeit poorly, with the Vietnamese kids next door, only vaguely understanding the word refugee. We slurped our ramen at lunchtime, me inevitably making a mess with my chopsticks. I noticed that they laughed more easily than others around me, my family included. They grew their own vegetables in a small patch of earth out back, chomped on radishes and green onions right from the ground, washed clean with a garden hose. I loved most the dandelions which sprouted up everywhere overnight, like a thousand suns scattered across the sloping grass. I plucked and gathered them, careful in my choosing, brought them to the back door as a gift. But my mother refused them, saying they would only attract bees, and to throw them away outside. Many years later, when my little girl placed a small bunch of dandelions in my hand, something in me lifted and something in me mourned all over again. We brought them inside, placed them in a small vase, and the bees, busy with their tireless work elsewhere, paid us no mind at all.

DEMONS

 

In my mother's view of the world,

a world long since passed

into memory and family lore, nearly every

affliction of the body, psyche, or soul

could be ascribed to demons.

There was the demon of alcohol, persistent

and familiar as the setting sun, the demon of lust,

the demon that caused epilepsy, and

my stammering lisp as a child.

Demons were, it seemed, everywhere --

in constant need of being cast out, sometimes

forcefully, in the sanctum of the church,

and in our humble living rooms,

the preacher gone red-faced with intent,

his voice commanding, one tiny river

of sweat trickling down his cheek.

My mother said, more than once, that my father

must have been possessed by demons

which had caused him to gamble and drink,

to womanize, and abandon his children,

running like a fugitive from one end

of the country to the other, and back again.

She didn't mean it metaphorically.

She meant, I think, that no man could

possibly be purely evil without

some assistance, that there must be

an unseen hand holding the map,

guiding, relentlessly turning his back to the world,

and sweeping clean his tracks

until the man himself, however upright he

had begun, could no longer be seen.

7000 PAIRS OF CHILDREN'S SHOES ON THE CAPITOL LAWN

 

Where have you run to so quickly, dear children,

so fast and so frantic that you have flown,

wingless, from your shoes -- the mud-streaked sneakers

and Mary Janes, the summer flip-flops and rainbow

jellies, Western boots and boxy black Oxfords,

reserved for church and family weddings.

You have left no tracks, dear children, your voices

so high that they drip from the tips of branches,

or are disguised among the shrieks of passing birds.

But it's your songs which we miss the most now,

how you narrated the most mundane of days,

called out the clouds by name, laughed

so hard that we worried over your very breathing.

We have placed them here upon the lawn,

rows and rows of them, awaiting your return.

We have left a path between each for you to walk.

You do not answer, even with your silence.

Children, it's getting darker with each passing minute.

How will you find your way after sunset

and nothing on your feet? What could we have

done to keep you away so long?

COMFORTING THE CHILD

 

Being the only son of parents who

abandoned their children as easily as one

walks to the grocery store -- one

preferring the soft oblivion of Stoli and

sleeping pills, the other the peculiar balance of

status and anonymity that only money

affords, -- I stand, perhaps, too closely to

my own girl, always on guard,

hovering, worrying myself into sleeplessness.

I am nothing if not vigilant, an occasional

nuisance of concern, golden retriever of a father

at the gate, barely blinking, awaiting my cue.

When she races up the steps of her school,

confident in a way which I never was,

my pride mingles with a tinge of unspoken grief.

Still, I want nothing more than to be taken

for granted, to never be known as an absence.

I want for her the autonomy of knowing,

for love to be as constant and as easily forgotten

as the silent pulse of blood at wrist

and ankle, and my hand upon her shoulder

when she hurts, drawing circles

on her back, comforting, not only her

but the child no longer there.

ILLNESS DURING CHILDHOOD

 

When my daughter becomes sick with fever,

unable to keep even water down, I am taken back

suddenly to those terrible illnesses of childhood,

gathering like storms on the horizons of

our brows, all of us, heat blazing through temples

east and west. I remember the holy eucharist

of saltines and warm 7-Up, the pinpricks of pleurisy

through lungs gone weary with coughing,

throat scraped raw, red one day, spotted white

the next, giving up the ghost of speech;

remember, too, the little brown bottles of Robitussin,

the mountains of knotted tissue hardening,

the smell of sickness seeping into everything.

I am reminded of how we learned to walk

through sleep, as we had in waking life, pushing

hard in our delirium against heavy furniture

as though ships stubbornly clinging to shore,

while visions of saints and ancestors floated patiently

past our doors and windows, visitors which no one

would have believed had we mentioned them.

I remember how we became somehow weightless

and immovable at once, sleeping so hard

that no dream could have roused us, our limbs

growing limp and longer through the night,

reaching out for that mythical land of sunlight

and well being, until one morning we did

awake, bright eyed once more upon a shore

of cool linoleum, our bodies new and uncertain,

flat feet plodding from one room to the next,

so thirsty that we could have drank the rain clouds dry.

WHAT WE CARRIED WITH US

 

It couldn't have been much, whatever

could be tossed into two plastic garbage bags

and carried, from the station wagon

to the front porch of our foster home,

a word which we had neither heard nor spoken,

but one that would become as common

as a surname, shorthand for others to describe us.

We carried our toothbrushes and combs,

clothes and underwear, carried whatever toys

or stuffed animal could be retrieved,

while the cacophony of sirens sped our comatose

mother to the cold comfort of hospital rooms,

plastic roses, a potpourri of pills to replace

the ones which had not managed to kill her.

We took a blanket or two, worn and pilling,

superhero pajamas, damp familiarity

of our own sweat-smell.

But mostly, we took all that we could not

speak of -- the unshifting weight which

an absent father leaves, ladder rungs of anxiety

we could neither climb nor give name to,

the mutual shame of bed wetting

and the sudden difficulty of common speech.

We carried each other, brother, hardly

aware that we were doing so, always balancing,

always stronger than we looked or imagined.

We carried that grief until it settled in,

quiet and unobtrusive, a gentle tune humming

through the bones. I'm singing it now, though you

have been gone now these many years,

pausing just long enough for you to whistle

through the grass blades, bend that grosbeak's note

just so, rustle the cotton shirts and work pants

upon the line in a pantomime of breath,

the familiar motion of walking away.

MAGIC

 

My daughter pulls a coin from behind my left ear,

turning it toward the afternoon light,

smiling almost imperceptibly, obviously

pleased with this trick she has observed

somewhere, and has perfected quietly on her own.

Others soon follow: an endless river

of brightly colored cloth spilling out from

her sleeve, my fortune told by

complicated folds and triangles of paper,

the choices seemingly endless.

I pick a card from an ordinary pack,

and after a few hesitant attempts, its match

at last makes itself known.

But it's how she grew as tall as the pocket

of my work shirt, when I had left

the room for what seemed a moment,

It's that she chose to be here with us at all,

first appearing as light, then sound,

then an inexhaustible bundle of questions.

For now we stick with the simpler tricks

from her dimestore handbook,

the severed thread put back together,

the handkerchief floating like a friendly ghost

above the round house of her hand.

And I need not feign surprise or wonder

as she works her way through each.

I am, I confess, in awe of it all.

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.