LOST AND FOUND

 

It's not as easy to disappear as it once was,

back in those long ago days before endless threads

of information and the 24-hour news cycle,

before constant surveillance became acceptable,

and anyone, past or present, could be found

with a few clicks on a phone or laptop.

People went missing, and very often stayed that way,

sometimes by choice and elaborate plans,

sometimes turning up with amnesia

in a city on the other side of the world.

Those stories became books and movies, discussed

with amazement at work and the dinner table.

Deaths were staged, and former lives disowned;

a father went out for a pack of cigarettes

and was never heard from by his family again.

My own father ran a successful business

mere blocks from our home, though I never once

saw his face or heard his voice until years later.

You, too, old friend, somehow disappeared

in plain sight, your retreat at first subtle,

then complete, as if planned years in advance.

There was nothing anyone could do.

You became a story with neither an ending

nor linear narrative; though I am speaking of you

now -- that's nothing new -- speaking of you

in the only way I know, reminding myself

that once you were here, right where I am now,

and that once, not so long ago, you could

have said all of this better yourself, could have come

back, if only to tell us what really happened.

GHOST STORIES

 

Visiting the Finnish Lutheran Cemetery,

the small clapboard church leaning wearily toward

the empty highway, my cousin reminds me

of what the gravediggers told her, how the residents here

grow restless in the evening, walking and conversing,

as if not yet settled on this idea of being dead.

"But," she reminds me, by way of disclaimer,

"they have been known to partake in the whiskey."

Everyone has a ghost story around here:

restless ghosts walking the creaking staircase all night,

opening the heavy doors and windows, shaking

the rusty box springs of the bed, or the mischievous one

who locked the unsuspecting dog in the car overnight,

and the stubborn one who followed the family when

the farmhouse burned to the blackened ground.

My ghosts, by contrast, are so reserved, hardly stirring

from their bodies of air, speaking only from the measured

silence of the page, leaving even the dust in its place.

I told you, dear friend, to visit as often as you like,

test your presence in this once-familiar world,

read the poems you wrote when still a teenager,

amused, I would imagine, by what seemed

so important to you then. Haunt me as you like, love.

Come close. Hover, the way you sometimes did

when I worked, if only to see if you are in the words

I have not yet begun to write or understand.

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.

HOW ARE YOU?

 

In this country -- forever in a hurry, forever

distracted by the fast word and the fast dollar --

when someone asks, "How are you?",

they immediately begin speaking of their own day,

their family, a medical procedure they will be

having the following week -- or they simply continue

walking, hardly expecting an answer

or even acknowledgement. It is, for the most part,

the verbal equivalent of a nod or a wave, polite

and yet, if we are being honest, largely meaningless.

But I come from a very northern people --

reserved and sincere to a fault --

with little regard or use for small talk.

Such a question is regarded as personal, even intrusive,

and the one asking should be prepared for

a long and tangled story, personal grief or love

confessed, or a long buried secret that had

been waiting decades for the sweet air of release.

So when I asked this of you, who had just

traveled for hours by plane to visit family and friends,

and to sit next to me on this worn red sofa,

and you began weeping, softly at first,

shuddering, open and unapologetic

with your tears, it was a language I easily understood.

"No one has asked me that in so long,"

you managed to say, as we embraced with no need

for further words or translation, letting the waves

ease slowly into stillness and quiet,

the safe passage of another day opening,

the wonder of its ordinary light, thin along the horizon,

toward a country in which we both could live.

ROGER

 

They said you were trouble even back then,

hanging from the highest ledge

you could find, cadging smokes from

the older boys, proud to add a new curse word

to your ever-expanding arsenal.

I knew only that you were my friend,

no better or worse than the rest of us project brats,

in and out of the system, wandering our

small world freely, mostly without consequence,

scavengers and explorers not expected

home until the blue-tinged halos of

streetlights flickered up and down the block.

Years later, visiting our foster mother

for what would be the last time,

I asked about you, and where you might be.

"Oh," she sighed, as if blowing out

a puff of imaginary smoke, while gazing

down at the gray-tinged sidewalk, "You don't

want to know about Roger. Believe me."

I knew that she meant jail, knew she meant

one wrong turn leading to another, and another,

until no escape route could be found,

I knew that she meant you never really stood

a chance, a born and raised statistic.

I made my own mistakes, neither unique

nor decisive -- but I am still here

to speak of you, to remember your wildness

as the innocence it was, your laughter

pure as you raced through the ditch grass,

rough stars from the sticker bushes

clinging to your skinny ankles, running simply

for the sake of running, or maybe

just to show the rest of us

where that trampled path might lead.

THE LAST SUPPER

 

When Aunt Anita got word from the clinic

that the cancer was fanning outward

like a web of newly shattered glass,

and that it was, in fact, inoperable, she promptly

planned a get together for family and friends,

an informal wake that she would attend,

and which she dubbed -- not without a touch

of gallows humor -- her last supper.

She arrived in a ball gown, sequined and sparkling,

her long dark hair newly styled, flitting

from table to table, bar stool to bar stool,

glasses raised and clinking, remembering both

the good times and the hard times with

those she knew -- and she knew nearly everyone.

She was their confidante, keeper of their

stories, their sorrows, and secrets.

The next morning she slipped quietly into

a coma, one long dream receding into

another, never again to wake.

Born into nothing, into a town so insignificant

that no one had bothered to name it,

she left this world, nonetheless, dressed to the nines,

a benevolent ruler with a Louisville slugger

tucked behind the bar, just in case.

She left, quite simply, glowing.

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.

BEFORE THE TOWERS FELL

 

New York that summer was a city half-hidden

behind miles of scaffolding, everything seemingly

being sandblasted, repainted, and refitted,

every rooftop and arch, every window

reaching upward toward a sky of shifting blue,

strangely calm above the grime and clatter of it all.

Walls of glass reflected the bodies of workers,

like the saints framed in the windows of

the crumbling cathedral across from our hotel.

Mostly I remember walking, from one borough

to the next, the city blocks so brief compared to those

seemingly endless boulevards of the Midwest,

the sights, sounds, and smells of a dozen countries

around every corner. I remember stopping for

lunch at the Empire Diner, drinks at the KGB,

remember the famous dancer that you recognized

from a movie sliding gracefully into an SUV,

as though part of a larger routine which no one

on the street had been made aware of.

We walked with aching hips and bandaged heels,

as though tourism was, in fact, as serious

a sport as any, as if youth demanded motion.

Tonight, on yet another bleak anniversary,

I listen, with the others, to the silence, gazing up

at those blue columns of light, as though

they were somehow holding up the sky itself;

I think of the two we once were... before.

Such a small and simple word that must bear,

against all odds, the weight of the unimaginable.

Were we walking into the past all along,

the evening sun beside us reflected a thousand

different ways, yet impossible to pin down?

When did distance itself become destination,

our paths reaching, like those long pillars

of light, separately, into what we could not say?

Where, dear friend, did we go?

HAIRCUT

 

There was a time when you would

never have let her get this close,

a time when neither of you could be in

the same room for more than a moment.

Her touch was not of your concern,

her words no longer yours to decipher.

But you have no one else to ask

to help with this most ordinary of tasks;

so here you sit, pale and shirtless

in the porcelain chill of bathroom light

as she trims and snips, seemingly

at random, cautiously maneuvering

the electric trimmer across the contours

of your skull, rounding the arches

above your ears, stepping back to consider,

then moving closer, as a lover might

that moment just before a first kiss.

You will not speak of this as an intimacy.

You will manage a simple Thank you,

reaching quickly for the worn shirt

hanging haphazardly from the radiator,

as if suddenly realizing that you were late

for one appointment or another, or that

something you could not quite name

had startled you into movement.