ON THE RURAL ROUTE

 

We arrived in the heat-thrum of summer

without warning, two young towheaded aliens from

the land of housing projects and junk yards

commandeered as playgrounds, spent the newly

lengthening days wandering, seeking out box turtles

and toads, garter snakes, plucking fat shining ticks

and the dark tongues of slugs from our sunburned arms

and legs, setting out on small, rickety boats, each

painted a different shade of ever-peeling blue,

puffy orange life vests smelling of must,

of those thick, watery seasons long since passed.

In the winter months, the school bus sometimes

could not get through, and the snowplows were slow

to find us, scraping their stubborn way up that

narrow curve of road to our small scattering

of cabins barely visible, the deep-frozen lake on one

side and the deep hibernating fields on the other,

furrows grown hard as gravestone beneath.

The small black-and-white TV was mostly snow

as well, only one local channel's signal strong enough

to reach our clothes-hanger antenna, giving us

the news we could easily see for ourselves.

The weighted sky hung low, the white earth rising

to meet it, growing closer from all directions,

while all else in the world became hopelessly far away,

our lessons for the day stretched out before us,

waiting to be written, before the early fall of dark.

MATHEMATICS

 

My scalp prickled with tiny beads of anxiety.
Everyone had left school but me and Mr. Heaney,
who hovered like an unwelcome shadow, occasionally
rising from the fortress of his desk,
hands clasped behind his back,
gray New Balance sneakers
all but silent in their slow, deliberate steps.
The blackboard had been wiped clean of equations,
dark and certain as the night sky,
with only
a few ghostly wisps of that other world showing through.
I was trying and failing, trying and failing to master
long division and algebra, the worksheet paper
worn nearly to nothing from my endless revisions.
The universe, he liked to remind us, is made of numbers.
You must know this if you are to know anything.
I did not doubt this, though it was a language
the Creator had clearly chosen to keep from me.
I labored on as the afternoon light gradually shifted,
the blank face of the clock counting out its lengthening
seconds, each with a small sense of finality.
I could imagine the invisible threads connecting
all things, like the elaborate webs of spiders,
glistening, though I gave them neither name nor meaning.
I could hear the voices of what sounded like summer
outside the window, voices rising and falling,
could almost make out the words that elicited their sudden laughter, though it all seemed, in those
strictly measured moments, to be light years away.

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.

PARIS, 1911

 

We never made it to Paris, though the framed Steiglitz print of a rain-swept boulevard in that city -- everything gone gray, everything blowing to one side -- which hung for so long in our old apartment, is here with me now. The same thin tree, half-bare and bent beneath the weight of the sky, still reaches upward in defiance; the same street sweeper, shrouded from shoulders to ankles, stoops as though retrieving something dropped to the reflecting water below. The same shadowy figures and buggies in the distance continue to move slowly past. I can almost smell the rain through this curtain of years, can almost hear the whoosh and drumming of it, as if it were approaching us here today. For the moment, this scene rests in the narrow hallway which leads to the bedroom, awaiting the right wall, the right light. You, of course, are not here to ask; and on any wall, in any room, it seems only to get further and further away.

TURBULENCE

 

Flying into New York for the first time,

all those years ago, the plane gliding through

wisps of white cloud, waving and vanishing,

before the gray and the darkness

rose to meet us, rough knots of wind

jolting us one way, then another, as if God,

having failed to reach us through other means,

was again trying to get our attention.

Lightning broke like a crack in the glass,

the plastic curtain of the window falling shut,

while my anxious mind immediately began

to map out the details of our demise,

engines coughing and sputtering into silence,

the passengers behind us praying without reserve,

the strangely serene drop from 40,000 feet

to some abandoned field, your thin summer skirt

with its pattern of daisies blending into

the long, wet grass, the shapes of our bodies,

appearing to be running -- whether toward

each other or away -- imprinted into the earth.

But just as quickly, the darkness gave way

to sunlight, the clouds began to erase and rewrite

themselves, shapes of commas and ellipses

trailing off, above and below, the brief story of

our life together -- part comedy of errors,

part tragedy -- still being written, still in search

of an ending that would make sense.

ALL ABOUT THE BLUES

 

It's all about the blues, you remind me,

smiling, nodding in affirmation -- dry, chalky blue

of the sky brushing itself one way, then another,

unfathomable cobalt of the great lake churning below,

haint blue of my mother's Appalachian home,

undiluted sininen of the old country,

midnight rising like a bruise beneath the snow.

How many have come to greet us today,

come to call us back to the pulse and hum of this

indelible world, this never-too-familiar world,

this world of unfolding luxury, fear, and surprise?

You say there is a horizon here some days,

and sometimes we must make our own.

You say the colors we love most are the ones

we can never know by name, would not want to know,

colors that no amount of mixing could create.

Not until later, when you have painted this

landscape and placed it in my hands, its colors

still wet and shimmering -- reaching for one another,

as all things will -- do they begin to reveal

themselves, becoming at once a place I could

walk into, land or no land, sky or no sky,

a place in which I could easily drown.

DISAPPOINTMENT AFTER A BRIEF WINTER STORM

 

We had anticipated far worse, as the prophets of winter skies had been promising -- or threatening -- for days, the word "crippling" suddenly commonplace in their weather-speak. We had expected to be stranded, shut in, with nowhere to go but further into a stack of new books, the warm engines of cats humming softly on our laps. But today we wake to crisp blue skies, walls of snow stacked neatly on either side of the street, cars already easing their way through with little resistance. Our responsibilities have found us again, our collective relief mingled with a strange sense of disappointment, not unlike what my mother must have felt when her Messiah failed to return yet again. We had longed to hunker down amongst the fresh winter silence, to claim the lengthening hours as our own, to bend our backs to help our neighbors before retreating to our newfound lives -- solitary, unhurried, underground.

I HAD NEARLY FORGOTTEN

 

I had nearly forgotten the poem

you had sent to me, one

that I had tucked away

to read in a quieter moment,

a moment much like this --

the low winter sun sifting through

the delicate maps of frost

upon the window glass,

blue folding imperceptibly into

gold and back again,

and each word offering itself

like the smallest of birds,

the kind my young daughter paints

with two quick brushstrokes,

each small movement threaded

to another, lifting the whole

of the sky with ease.

AT THE NATURALIZATION CEREMONY

 

The families begin arriving early, the men in freshly

pressed suits, pocket squares, the women in bold patterned

dresses and colors that defy the gray drizzling skies,

their faces without exception beaming with light,

young children at their sides looking up,

knowing this day to be something extraordinary.

"There are people who live here who hate this country,"

the young woman from Colombia explains

to a local newscaster, shaking her head, "but to us,

this is still The Promised Land. It's everything."

I can't help but think of my own ancestors, who, too,

arrived with nothing, learned to speak this strange, unruly

language, drive cars, fight this nation's many wars.

It's hard to imagine my steely-eyed great-grandfather,

never caught smiling in a photo, wearing a face of

such unabashed joy. But what do I know of another's heart?

I know only this moment, this day, this swell of pride

as these new citizens make their way up Kellogg Boulevard,

their small flags waving in the chilly damp air.

It is as though a hundred or more makeshift boats were

setting out, each on a separate but similar course.

Even when they have all but vanished from view,

their voices can still be heard singing, laughing,

proclaiming -- so many different dialects, different

songs, so many different ways to say Home.