THE NOTE

My brother and I never said I love you

to each other. Not in the three decades or so

we were in this world together.

We were guys, after all, and guys --

at least the ones we knew of -- joking,

mumbling, and cursing their way

through each day at school, or gazing

cool and distant from the flickering canvas

of a movie screen -- just didn't do that.

When I was a teenager, being shipped by plane

to our ailing mother fives states away,

he walked with me to the boarding gate

at Sea-Tac, surprising me by slipping a piece

of paper, neatly folded and creased,

from the cellophane of his cigarette pack,

and placing it calmly into my hand.

"Read this on the plane," he said quietly,

as though its contents were something covert,

instructions to be burned upon reading.

But his words, painstakingly printed in all caps,

were simple and direct, words which

he could not speak but had, I imagined,

carried from place to place within himself,

until he was certain they were right;

I, too, have spent the better part of a lifetime

trying and failing to find the right words --

sometimes even one -- circling, eventually, back

to the source of whatever needed saying,

and everything that never did.

MY MOTHER AFTER HER SECOND STROKE

When I call her on her eighty-sixth birthday, her words

come out slanted, complete within themselves, 

but unattached to any discernible subject or reference point. 

They rise like invisible threads into the air, circling, 

lingering, then going their separate ways. 

Sometimes she pauses, longer than expected,

as though trying to re-enter the doorway of thought. 

Sometimes a sound takes the place for a word or phrase. 

Her speech has become a palimpsest of sorts, 

her stories overlapping in time, ignoring the rules of 

present and past tense, refusing to stay put.

She speaks of her sister, gone now for decades, 

paying a visit, how they laughed and ordered chow mein. 

She tells me that her mother, my Grandma Artie, 

is sleeping in her room with her, an arrangement that 

she seems to find both comforting and amusing. 

"I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me," 

she says in wonder, "but she's right here."

She tells me how they drove out to the old house 

on Western together, as though not a year had passed. 

"What do you think about that?," she asks, though 

it's less of a question and more an exclamation. 

I ask her what she thinks of it, then add that I'm happy 

they're getting this time together. She agrees.

But sleep is never far off, and she is tired again. 

Still, I hope there are one or two more stories to be told,

in whatever form. I will do my best to follow.

BEGINNINGS

 

We are lined up quietly against the wood-paneled wall of the hallway, my older siblings and I, as if we are under inspection, or about to give some sort of recital for which we have forgotten to rehearse. But this is not a performance. Certainly nothing that could be prepared for. This is the moment our mother is being wheeled out on a stretcher, hovering somewhere between this world and the other, a bleached white blanket thrown over her, not unlike the heavenly robes in my illustrated children's Bible. This is the decision she has made, for reasons we cannot fathom. I am the youngest, and therefore the closest to her face as it passes. I want to say something -- anything -- want to reach out, but I have only been instructed to stand here, and to remain as out of the way as possible. The EMTs speak rapidly in their practiced medical code, all abstract phrases, acronyms, and numbers. None of it sounds clear. Time makes no logical sense in these moments, everything rushing by in a whir, then to an almost excruciating slow motion. The wheels of the stretcher squeak and clack in rhythm, the screen door slaps open and the ambulance departs, its siren spilling out in all directions. Then, there is only the silence between us, strange but certain, as if it has been waiting all this time to fill each corner of these rooms. Someone will come to check on us, they must. But for now, we are five kids suddenly on our own. Our mother is gone, and will be gone for some time. In some ways, she will never return.

DREAM DOOR

 

In the dream there is a small hidden door in my mother's bedroom, the kind that was once used for ice deliveries in old apartment buildings, or a crawl space leading to a tangle of wires, spiderwebs, and rusty pipes. But when I bend low to open it, the exact same room appears on the other side, the same bedside table and lamp, the same red bedspread, the same bottles lined up like a miniature skyline. In fact, the whole interior of the house is there, in reverse. Though I am very young, I can walk through it by memory, taking a left where normally I would go right. I can hear and smell coffee percolating from the kitchen, a television sounding low and far away. But nothing happens in this dream. It is merely a feeling of calmness I have walked into, the very strangeness of the mundane. No one is shouting here. No one is leaving. There are no sirens wailing outside the window, no red lights reflecting against the glass. It is impossible for me to tell if this is before, or after, or never was. It is a dream that I tell to no one, for there is nothing to tell. But after I wake, it's a dream I immediately want to get back to. But of course I can't return. I can never return.

MY MOTHER AT EIGHTY-SIX, RECOVERING FROM AN ISCHEMIC STROKE

 

This isn't the first time she has left this way -- hovering between sleep and awake, speech and silence, breath and no breath. When we were kids, the pills and the Stoli nearly washed her away, bringing her only partway back. The ECT and barbiturates softened her eyes to a blue-tinged fog, a weather we could not grasp. But this time she seems closer to the further shore, more resigned to stand among its trees and shadow. Her body sleeps on one side, like a child nuzzling closely in the first chill of autumn. The words that come now, if they come at all, tumble out in fragments, like the torn scripture of some long lost gospel. They break free of source and context, uncertain but continuing, trailing off like the memories she has spent a lifetime trying to erase. This woman, stubborn as the sun and moon, whose version of Jesus brandished a sword toward the open sky, offers neither confession nor consolation. She travels silently on wheels now, waiting without expression for her lunch and medication, for whatever can be easily recognized, waiting for her own version of leaving to return.

EARLIEST MEMORY

The first thing I can remember is water -- not a lake

or river but the rising level of it in the bathtub, the untroubled

sheen of its surface splashing over the lip of porcelain,

below which many imaginary explorers went in search of

new worlds, new creatures, new routes of escape.

I am holding my favorite rubber alligator, the one I will

soon bring with me to foster care. But not just yet.

I have locked the door, but cannot remember

doing so. I can hear voices calling on the other side,

going back and forth, but do not answer.

I like the hum and gurgle of the water. I like the quiet.

But my older sister, convinced that I am drowning,

has scaled the creaking fire escape and kicked in

the window with her flimsy summer sandals, throwing

shards of glass across the smooth tiled floor.

They are like small jewels, aquarium green at their edges;

I want to pick them up and turn them in my hands.

We are fine, but we are both in trouble now.

Though our mother does not stir from the sanctuary of

her television-blue room, the permanent dusk she cultivates,

and does not bother to unlock her door. It is not time

for us to break that door in, its frame dangling

like a broken cross, nails bent downward. Not just yet.

For now, she stays in bed as though tethered there,

drifts in an ocean that is not quite oblivion,

steered by starlight we can neither follow nor understand.

We are fine, we are; but we will be in trouble soon.

RITUAL

 

In those days, back in the hills of Tennessee, you knew why

the church bell tolled at an unusual hour of the day,

sometimes signaling with a few short hammer strokes,

sometimes slow and sustained, going on and on,

ringing out once for each year of a life now passed.

Someone had to cover the windows and mirrors,

lest the spirit enter and be trapped inside the glass.

Someone had to edge the stationary in black, and to stop

the clocks, as they had stopped for the departed.

Someone had to wash the body, a sacred rite for the closest

of kin, neither to be hurried nor turned away from.

Someone had to stay up with the body, keeping watch,

wildflowers and juniper masking the smell of decay,

mingling with the warm comfort of constantly brewing coffee.

My mother has not forgotten placing silver dollars

on the eyelids of aunts and uncles, of touching

the hand of the deceased in the belief that it would

remove a blemish, which she says it did. But my mother --

having buried her parents, siblings, and two children

at early ages -- is a lifetime removed from that wide-eyed girl,

and from that sepia-tinted world of front porch songs

and white whiskey, of tobacco leaves on bee stings

and a pair of good overalls for Sunday, a Ball jar of pickled

pig's feet and a can of bacon grease above the stove.

She has requested for herself that there be no ceremony,

no tributes, no songs to be song or scripture read,

and above all, no one gazing upon her body.

Perhaps she is simply removing the trappings of this world

in advance, blotting out the unnecessary, the gaps

in her memory becoming the narrowest of bridges now;

her prayers -- whatever they may hold, in whatever

order recited -- require no words to be lifted.

SNAPSHOT FROM MY MOTHER'S WEDDING

 

My brother stands just outside the door frame,

a small coffee cup in hand, while I sit on a folding chair,

thin and lanky in a too-big secondhand suit,

hunched forward, scribbling in a moss-colored notebook.

Neither of us particularly wants to be here -- though

of course we cannot say -- the pastel carnations pinned

to our chests belying our expressionless faces.

Our mother is marrying for the third time -- this time

to a good old boy from south Texas who no one

cares for or trusts more than the weather here in spring.

This was before he spit her name out like a curse,

his hands having become more menace than comfort,

and certainly before he held a shotgun to her head,

threatening to paint the wood-paneled walls with whatever

thoughts and dreams she might have left inside her;

and it's a few years before my brother lifted him

by the neck, dangling like a scarecrow in stocking feet,

eyes popping like buttons, holding him there calmly,

steadily, breathing hard but slowly, until our sister's shouts

convinced him to at last let go, allowing him to fall.

But this is not that moment; this is merely a snapshot

of that young man, having found a quiet corner

for a moment, writing his way towards all he cannot

know, his left hand curling above the page, pale sunlight

filtered from another room, hovering like smoke.

MY MOTHER'S CHINA

 

My mother's china -- bone-white, heavy in young hands,
encircled with a pattern of sky-blue flowers
and filigree, tiny leaves pointing in all directions
at once -- emerged from the far reaches of the cupboards
only twice a year -- Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
It was a set acquired, piece by piece, each having its day,
by saving up a small fortune in S&H green stamps
from the local Red Owl -- the delicate teacups
and saucers, the weighted serving tray, dinner plates
and bread plates, a cream pitcher for coffee.
Even butter claimed its own home -- such extravagance!
Yet we could not have know -- how could we? --
what such an ordinary luxury might mean to our mother,
to at last have something simple and fine, something stately
among the brick and cinder block of the projects,
the mountain girl from Tennessee, denied even a doll
or summertime shoes, trying hard to forget one
lifetime while imaging another, brighter somehow,
which might or might not choose to emerge.
But twice a year, at least, we drank our milk from goblets
like royalty, poured our canned, grayish vegetables
and gelatinous cranberry sauce onto what we imagined
must have been the prettiest plates in town,
while that gravy boat, loaded with thick, brown cargo,
sat motionless among the white cloth of its waters,
dreaming already of the long voyage home,
its sturdy bow not to be seen again for months.

PHONE BOOTH

 

Once, you could find one almost anywhere,

a small and unassuming refuge, and sometimes

the only shelter from a sudden downpour,

the floor of an uncertain summer sky collapsing,

casting hard fistfuls of rain and hail against

the narrow panes of glass, tumbling down from

its small square roof, dimly-lit from within.

Sometimes it seemed the only refuge

from the constant clang and drone of the city,

the exact intersection of public and private,

a hand-me-down space that granted legitimate reason

for squeezing in close beside your first girlfriend,

stranded, shivering, calling home for a ride.

I can still feel the weight of those phone books,

suspended by cables, knocking at our knees,

the thick heavy receiver, the unexpected blessing

of a coin someone had left, mistakenly or not.

I remember most my sister, exiled by our mother

to the booth outside the grocery store,

evenings whiled away under its moth-yellow glow,

chatting and laughing with her latest beau,

making call after call with the same lucky quarter.

There were always messages -- a religious tract

to make a child ponder the afterlife, always an expletive

or phone number, or the secret code of initials,

a bright red heart rounded with a Sharpie.

But you knew that someone loved someone else,

enough so to write it down for all to see,

or scratched it into metal, sticky and smudged,

those rough, uneven letters, as close to permanent

as anything -- their messages still there,

long after their houses have all been removed,

declaring themselves, always in the present tense,

far above our cool and collective silence.

DREAMING OF OLD JOBS

 

We still dream of those old jobs, the ones leading only to the next shift, the next break, the next paycheck and day off, to rest and to worry, and start it all over again. Those jobs that we gave so many years to follow us like ghosts, tracking us down in our anxious sleep, as if we had left one detail or another unfinished, forgot to lock up or turn the thermostat down. The waitress balances her tray of trembling water glasses two decades after she has retired, a cacophony of voices still calling out their orders. The bus driver turns his oversized wheel onto a street with neither a name nor discernable stops. Your mother still packs shells at the munitions plant ten hours a day, and your brother tears sheets of steel from the shearing machine into eternity, tiny stars of metal glinting beneath his skin. While you stand on the loading dock of a crumbling factory, ringing the service bell again and again. It's so early the birds are not yet stirring, the winter darkness folding in around you. But you have been here long enough. If no one answers this time, you think, you'll force yourself to wake, and be gone.

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.

By Ear

 

Sometimes, when I am writing, and I can't

quite hear the words in my mind, I speak them --

quietly -- so as not to frighten them away,

listening for the gentle resonance

of vowel sounds repeating themselves,

calling out to one another in a language of air,

their small sheltering caves echoing.

I listen for the well intentioned but uninvited,

the idea lacking grace, the bum note;

and I am reminded at times of my mother

who learned to play guitar this way,

listening closely to the Grand Old Opry

and the Hit Parade coming through that old

wooden radio, like a temple glowing,

pausing her mother's 78s again and again,

lifting its needle and setting it down at the start

to catch what didn't want to be caught,

to pull forth a sound she could already hear.

Sometimes I need to be reminded of

how to listen deeply, of the line that runs

directly from ear to heart, bypassing

all else, the sound of a single strum and a single

voice alone in a room, as simple as that,

the way all good songs begin.

THE SCENT OF THINGS

 

What I disliked most about moving into all those

different places during childhood -- houses

of family, friends of friends, or rank strangers --

was that nothing ever smelled familiar.

The dark scarred wood of dressers and doors

breathed silently in and out, the salt-grease aroma

of food arose from pots and pans long ago

scorched and settled into their particular seasoning.

Even water boiling was somehow not the same,

the grimy tea kettle hopelessly shrieking out of key.

Soap, perfumes and perspiration clung to every fold

of fabric, laundered or not, the musty basements

and dry dusty attics, the damp funk of dogs

had claimed their territory years before we arrived.

Most days I felt that I had stumbled onto a stage set

without the benefit of lines, or even motivation.

Most days came and went with neither incident

nor reason, the cloudy stove clock ticking.

The air outside felt closer to the truth, even in a place

I did not know. I followed my own tracks from

the day before, addressed the birch trees as family.

When I slept, I curled beneath the covers, knees

to elbows, even in summertime, worried that if I lost

the signature of my scent, I might lose myself for good.

PERSONAL EFFECTS

 

The family says that Uncle Leo was too sensitive

for the army, prone as he was to daydreams

and poetic whimsy, his soft, pale hands designed

for painting a canvas or cradling a violin,

not the long rifle and bayonet slung over his shoulder.

In the sepia-tinted photos, he looks like a 1950s

matinee idol on location, killing time between takes.

But he could shoot, like any Finnish farm boy,

could drop a buck or a boy in the wrong uniform

if need be. He just didn't understand the need.

Maybe he never recovered from the scythe

striking his head as a boy, hiding among the tall hay.

Maybe something inside him just kept falling.

When he drown at the foot of Mount Fuji,

the dark envelope of water sealing him indefinitely,

Grandma Tyyne went mad with her grief,

following him there a few short months later.

What was sent back wasn't much -- his boots shined,

uniformed pressed and folded, a few small

souvenirs, family photos, Japanese coins and yen.

I like to think that the birthday card he bought

for aunt Leona made it safely back , warped

only slightly by water, its smudged blue letters

looping back on themselves like waves.

I like to think she smiled at his sweetness

before her eyes clouded and all but disappeared.

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.

MY FATHER'S FACE

 

How many times, during those early years

of childhood, did I imagine the angled ridge of his jawline,

sharp with stubble, rough to the touch,

or freshly shaved, pinkish and smooth, smelling

of Aqua Velva aftershave, rye whiskey,

the faint residue of Lucky Strikes.

How I imagined, too, his ears, their lobes thick

and dangling like bells, his nose -- sometimes wide,

sometimes narrow -- dark pores oily with sweat --

and, of course, I tried hard to see his eyes,

their size and shape, what light might have been

captured there, the level of their questioning,

the depth of their feeling or recognition.

My mother, having not a single photograph

to show, said only that if I wanted to see

my father's face, I could just look in the mirror.

But to me, it might as well have been

the face of God, Jesus, or Job, those mythical

faces seen only in my imagination.

It was, after all, the face that my mother

once held, smiled back at, and breathed in deeply,

if only for that moment, the face that would

refuse, again and again, to look upon my own.

Though it was hard to imagine even

a narrow smile upon that face; and equally as hard

to conjure a look of sorrow or regret

brought forth by the burden of his leaving.

It was, I realize now, the face that was

always there, face beneath my own, long before I could

see or remember, its own shroud and palimpsest,

forever turning and turning away,

even now as I write these lines, a mask

of interiors silent as river stone, unraveling on sight,

a tale to be believed only by its absence.