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.

VISITING AMELIA EARHART'S HOUSE WITH MY DAUGHTER

 

We slow to a stop on Fairmount Avenue, the gentle swaying of summer Ash and Elm rising above us on either side, casting an imperfect net of shadows around our sneakered feet. The tall Victorian house has been well cared for, newly painted, as though lifted from another century and gently placed on this small slope of earth. People still live here, so we are mindful not to step upon the freshly-clipped lawn, or to gawk too long into the small curved windows above; though it's easy to imagine the face of that young girl looking out, dreamy and despondent in this foreign place, a harsh Minnesota winter swirling outside the glass. Was her adolescent mind already in flight, mapping a course amongst the heavens which no one else could see? My daughter and I wonder why some details seem clearer when farther away, ponder whether the sky is the greatest of all distances, or in fact its opposite. We have no schedule to keep, and nowhere in particular to be on this day, which makes such questions come more easily, if not their answers. The earth is tilting, though we cannot tell from where we stand; the afternoon sun is both warm and receding.

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.

LEARNING TO SWEAR

I didn't speak much as a child, though 

I learned early, as we all did, which words 

to avoid saying, even if muttered under our breath,

stepping carefully around them,

like broken glass littering the sidewalk,

referring to them, if compelled to,

only by their first letter or two. They were words,

mostly of bodily  function, that came with

punishment, words that got your mouth 

washed out with soap.

Later, I tried them out on my tongue,

alone in my room, foreign words,

oddly shaped and sharp, the sound of them

vaguely startling, even when unattached

to any particular meaning or context.

Last week, my daughter pleaded 

to learn a swear word in Finnish, which

I foolishly gave in to, a small stone

that will eventually be thrown 

back at me.

But since she was born, I have been trying

to unlearn the lazy and the vulgar,

leaving the slings and arrows 

to Shakespeare,

and those more clever with speech than me.

I want more praise, more praise,

less cursing of the gods we continually implore.

I want her to know -- and to know 

myself -- that I revere

this most ordinary of lives,

with its drudgery and inconsistencies, its shifting language 

which can never describe it all,

its welcoming silence at beginning and end.

BETWEEN BURSTS OF THUNDER, WE HEAR ROBINS SINGING

If we cannot learn the song

of these birds, calling through

the shuddering dark, let us at least

better study their silence.

If we cannot know the secrets

of their flight, let us at least

acquire the stillness they have

perfected on thin air.

LITTLE TREE

 

When my daughter was born, not

so very long ago -- entering this world early,

small enough to cradle in the palm

of my outstretched hand -- a friend gifted

our family a fig tree planted in her name,

thousands of miles from the cool, white hospital rooms

we called home during those first few weeks.

This morning, the rockets again drawing

their wordless script across that ancient landscape,

obliterating much, erasing the prayers

of the many and the few, their message

unmistakable, familiar, everything seems closer,

visceral, as sudden and startling as a punch.

I think again of that little tree, giver of

shade and light, respite, oxygen, that seemingly

endless ladder of knots and hidden doorways

for young, skinny arms and legs to climb,

stretching its coils of roots tentatively into a soil

continually scarred and shuddering with uncertainty;

little tree, little lamp, beginning and ending of

every fable, making its way -- as it must --

upward into the bright expanse of sky.

MY DAUGHTER RISES EARLY

 

My daughter rises early, and after gulping down

her breakfast cereal, begins to rummage

through her large collection of stuffed animals,

piled one on top of another in an oversized

plastic bucket, spilling over from the edges of

her bed, hiding silently in dusty corners.

She asks for two large bags, having decided, between

breakfast and getting dressed for school,

that most -- if not all of them -- must go.

So it's goodbye to the giggling Elmo, to raccoon,

and to Bear, who we left that time, and found again

safe and sound at the desk of our public library,

goodbye to Fred and Angelina, that kind pair of cats,

who must -- she reminds me -- stay together,

lest they be unhappy for the next child they are with;

the idea of another kid finding joy and comfort

makes her happy, which makes me feel somewhat

embarrassed by my sorrow, this sense of loss,

as if something living were being shown the door,

their painted eyes looking back at the rooms

they are leaving so soon, this kingdom of childhood

they, too, thought would last just a bit longer.

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.

AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY JUNE

 

It was the day of our neighborhood fair, the street closed from one end to the other to make room for carnival rides, local food vendors, and musicians. Kids with faces painted as jungle cats or superheroes strode up and down, panting dogs lapped up the water left out for them. Someone at the coffee shop had paid in advance for the next person's order, a gesture which was quickly taken up by the next, and the next, on and on, each new customer surprised by this mild act of generosity. The cash register grew quiet, the tip jar was emptied and filled again. I like to think this small, impromptu ritual went on long after I left, their smiles and nods, the polite raising of their glasses, stranger to stranger. "Kippis!," as my daughter and I say at home, a Finnish toast I first heard as "keep us" -- as in, keep us well, keep us together, keep us close to the source of this love, whatever the name. Keep us here, savoring that first sweet sip the whole length of the day.

FINNISH PANCAKES

 

We stand at the kitchen counter,

my young daughter and I, mixing together

the milk, flour, sugar, and eggs by hand,

and per the family recipe, we do not measure

too closely, and are careful not to over-mix.

This recipe, handed down from her great-aunts,

and much further back than that,

is more feel than science, I am reminded,

not so different than writing a poem or falling in love.

In other words, it's always the first time.

When in doubt, add more butter,

always remember who you are cooking for,

and don't be afraid of small mistakes.

We can never resist peeking into the secret realm

of the oven as it browns and bubbles up

over the rim of the pan, as if from the earth

itself, lovely in its imperfection. Moments later,

lingonberries and maple syrup dripping

from our lips, we agree that this must be the best

batch yet -- until the next, and the next.

This is sustenance, after all, but also

a kind of song, a calling back to a world

long past, before setting out into the bright

expanse of this new day.

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.

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.

ECHOCARDIOGRAM

 

There was a time, not so long ago,

when a young woman's hand sweeping

gently, purposefully across your bare chest

would spark a rush of movement

within the blood, stir the recognition

of one flesh meeting another, somehow

both new and ancient at once.

But today you have crossed a threshold

of sorts, where this young woman,

who balances perfectly kindness and business,

measures every bruised and weary chamber

of your heart. "Breathe in," she intones,

"Now stop. Hold that breath...Good."

From the corner of your eye, you can see

the black and white of the ultrasound,

like a closeup of the moon, or years ago

seeing your daughter for the first time,

hiccupping within her mother's frame.

You think, too, of the Buddha, said to pass

into prajnanibbana this way, reclined

on his left side, eyes half-closed, neither

looking nor looking away. But this,

this, you think, is merely a form of limbo,

the moment midway through the play

when the stage lights dim to a dusty blue

and the whole of the set is quickly rearranged.

You sit upright, button your shirt, surprised

by the sudden return of clinical light.

You thank her for her trouble, take the old soldier

in your chest -- by turns too fast, too slow,

too big for its own good -- meandering

down the hall, and out into the wintery day,

blustery and colorless, quietly resigned

to whatever might happen next.