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.

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.

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.

TO THE YOUNG WOMAN WEEPING WHILE DONATING PLASMA

 

I cannot know your story -- the river of time

and circumstance that brought you here

today -- only this slender moment of quiet

unraveling, weighted tears pooling and tumbling

from the corners of your almond eyes,

gray-blue and receding from view, your face --

so young -- bruised already from within.

Grief has come to claim you, this much is clear,

blurring your edges, as though submerged,

even in this clinical afternoon light;

grief gazes back, unblinking as the day itself

through the clouded lens of your phone.

The little I know, or at least pretend to believe,

I cannot speak, not wanting to be the unwelcome

stranger who pierces your necessary solitude.

I would not trouble you with all the heartaches

yet to come, as they most certainly will;

I would speak only of the moments between,

moments of ease and exhalation where

you could alter course, arranging possibilities

like so many books upon the shelf. I would

remind you simply to raise high the window blinds,

to leave the door ajar, so that when joy

returns, it will know just where to find you.

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 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.

HOUSE OF WONG

 

I never knew what they spoke of, my mother

and aunt, on those lazy Saturday afternoons in summer,

safe within the sanctuary of that restaurant,

always busy, its large temple-like doors painted

black and red, trimmed in extravagant gold,

a world far removed from the inquisitive ears of children.

We could not have imagined what our mothers

had lived through, the house of early horrors

they had endured daily as children, how the bodies

of men became threats against them,

could not have known the senseless anger of

a father who denied even their existence,

could not have known the cause and effect

set in motion long before we arrived.

We knew only the weekly ritual of their meeting,

their sisterly fellowship over greasy egg foo yong

and moo goo guy pan, the endless bowls of

sticky rice that occasionally made its way back to us

in those small white containers, wire handles

and waxy folds, stamped with a stately red pagoda.

If we were very lucky, a fortune cookie might be

tucked away in a purse, something simple

and sweet, the mysterious messages inside them

offering a riddle, or a bit of wisdom for our

childhood minds to ponder, considering as we cracked

them open what might happen next.

ON THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF YOUR DEATH

 

Twenty years have come and gone, brother,

as quickly as the space between one

breath and the next, a shrug or sigh, or that pause

after I had asked you something mundane

and obvious, barely requiring words, though

you would answer just the same.

Twenty years gone and you are never

quite an absence; I still slip into the present tense

when speaking of you, still dream you that way,

still send occasional word back from this

strange and broken world. Twenty years, and still

I search for you as I drive the old north end neighborhoods,

though the houses of our childhood, weathered

even then, are no more, replaced by

new frames, new siding and additions, new families

stirring and shuffling inside, doing things they

will remember only decades from now.

Even the housing projects have acquired

a small semblance of respectability, gone now

the prison-like walls of cinder block we used to scale,

hot to the touch beneath the summer sun,

replaced by open patios, brightly-colored pots

of plastic sprouting zinnias, daylilies, and aspidistra.

Twenty years gone in the blink of an eye,

one frame of the scene deceptively the same

as the next, though something of the earth

has been altered, irrevocably so, each season

and slant of light rushing in blindly, barely noticing

who or what has been left behind.

SECOND MEETING WITH MY FATHER

 

After burying my half-brother that afternoon, I asked the cab driver to drop me at my father's shop on Rice Street, two blocks up from the housing projects, where as a child I had so often imagined him, alternately captaining a ship through far-off lands, or swilling cheap wine under a bridge with the other derelicts. But here I was, surprising him, weighted and imbalanced with grief and a lifetime of questions which I could not bring myself to articulate, even now. He moved, at his ease, through rows of carpet and color samples, walls stacked with gallon drums of paint, back to his wood-paneled office. I noticed the pigmentation of his hands had receded, leaving patches the color of lard shining through, or the underside of a painting that has begun to chip. "Well..." he began, offhandedly, "you and I just kind of went our separate ways" -- as if this were an explanation, as if the child had somehow agreed and denied the father as well. He leaned back in his desk chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows pointed in either direction, asked what I did for a living. I told him that I was a poet, which he failed to acknowledge one way or another. "I mean," he tried again, "What do you do to put money in your pocket?" I shrugged, stammered out one dead-end job or another. It was hard to imagine this most plain-spoken of men ever sweeping my mother off of her feet, however briefly. But wounded people have a way of finding each other, and are privy to a language of their own. It was, in part, why I was here, a product of that wound. This, then, was the earthly kingdom he had constructed, and had chosen again and again. It was, I suppose, a life that he could understand, one of facts and figures, the tangible and the easily stated. I left him to it.

FIRST APARTMENT

 

When I think of being seventeen, I think

of that dingy one-room apartment above

the nameless laundromat, its dirty glass clouded

with steam, potato-sweat stench and clutter

of that windowless apartment, rickety wooden stairs

leaning wearily against the red brick outside,

ready to collapse, shifting even without the weight of steps.

I remember the anonymous maps of water-stained

walls, so thin that I could hear my neighbors

coughing and brushing their teeth, playing the same

sad songs over and over, could feel the vibrations

of the industrial washers and driers below, like invisible

lovers nearing climax, never quite arriving.

When I think of being seventeen, I think

of walking to school in the dim morning, the afternoon

bus ride to work, bleary-eyed, the endless hours

given over to others in the name of survival,

collapsing at night onto a musty mattress

on the floor; I remember the kindness and mercy

of young women who passed through,

bringing canned soup and the comfort of touch, so new

and foreign, the small curtains of their mysterious

rooms opening just enough to let in the light,

remember the Dutch Bar across the street,

the line of gleaming Harleys outside, where someone

seemed to get stabbed every other week,

and the elderly deaf mute down the hall signaling

to no one in particular, a pinched sound like

a distant bird rising from the well of her throat,

a word of caution, perhaps, or insight that

I could not understand, then or now.

LARRY

 

Larry was the name of the man that my mother

married next, somewhere between ECT treatments

and her daily regimen of pills -- tall, gaunt and ruddy-faced,

simian ears that jutted forward like antennas,

or seashells, glowing translucent and red when

pierced by sunlight, tiny veins like a hundred cracks.

He mistook the marriage, I expect, for one

of love, but my mother needed him for

the much more practical task of disciplining my unruly

brother and me, which he did, following her

instructions like any low-level officer.

He was the first to fold me over a kitchen chair

and strike me, hard, then harder, and then hard enough

to dislodge me from the body, until there I was,

amazingly, watching somehow from above,

as though my own protector, keeper of a hidden

passageway deep within myself, previously unknown.

I didn't think that he was a bad man,

merely someone following orders, obedient

to a fault, perplexed, I imagined, as I was, watching,

as though this were but a poorly acted play.

Though I was, secretly, proud to have not cried,

proud to have left the body, without anyone so much

as noticing; and when I came back, having passed

their test, apologizing for my meager sins,

I didn't come back all the way. Not for them,

and not for a long time to come.

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.

THE CORNER

 

Another punishment from childhood,

as familiar as going to church or setting

the dishes out for dinner, was being sent to stand

in the corner, intersection of shame

and boredom, to think about what I had

or had not done, to gaze into nothing

and plan my humble route back to forgiveness.

I learned well the corners of every home

that we passed through, their particular silences,

removed from the clamor of daily routine,

the television's canned laughter, voices rising

and falling, bellowing from room to room.

I memorized the vein-like cracks spreading

through the eggshell plaster, air bubbles

beneath the paint, the fine, stray hairs

and wisps of spiderweb long since abandoned,

knew precisely where two sheets of wood

paneling came together, imperfectly,

the slender nails that held them,

and where the tiny splinters slept hidden.

I couldn't help but wonder why I disappointed

God so often, and why I seemed so far

removed from his sacred image.

I learned to sleep standing up, unnoticed,

learned to count obsessively the ceiling tiles,

the inward folds of curtains, and wallpaper patterns,

learned to turn my mind off, and on,

and off again; I became still, became a very

fine singer in the auditorium of self.

I learned, through necessity, that my place

was just off to the side, resting

on the warm shoulder of my thoughts,

and that even the smallest hint of disobedience

could send me back to windowless solitude,

and that the wrong words spoken

could bring the whole structure down.