FIRST GENERATION

 

Our grandparents sent long, descriptive letters from across the ocean, while we recited the pledge of allegiance to a flag of forty-eight stars in a one-room schoolhouse, the familiar language of home left at the door, along with the breath-damp wool of scarves and mittens in winter. I am an American now, we were made to recite again and again, and to write it in our notebooks until it became as familiar as our own names, the names which others could not or would not pronounce correctly, and could alter with the stroke of a pen. Our prayers, too, were in English, but only when spoken out loud. Our parents, aunts, and uncles braided the old language with the new, sometimes losing track, beginning again, sometimes inventing a new word where no other could be found. But our silence, in endless variations, was easily understood, neither awkward nor American. It sat as easily as a hammock stretched between two pines, swaying gently from east to west, responsive to the slightest breeze.

THE UNSPOKEN

 

Part of Uncle Silas always resided in absence, the quiet and the still, his handsome face just off to the side in old photographs, gazing over his shoulder into the distance, or down at the solemn and familiar earth, smiling slightly, as if some joke or pleasantry had been spoken between them. Unlike my father, he took the cure for booze at the clinic in Duluth, telling no one, returning weeks later, clean-shaven and rested, as though he had merely driven to the grocery store and back. When he married, later in life, he didn't bother to inform the family, so averse was he to drawing attention to himself. He worked at the hospital up in Hibbing, learning the secret language of blood through the thumbnail lens of a microscope. He called it a dance. When ALS came to rob him of his touch, and then his speech, his limbs hardening like the branches of a weathered tree, he retreated further. I can see his sturdy frame receding, folding into itself, can see the old black-and-white television flickering, the news already old somehow. I can see the newspapers he could no longer hold stacked up beside him, all those words and faces gone blank, all those stories -- like his own -- waiting to be told.

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.

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.

BROTHER SONG

 

Brother, have you at last earned

the peace and solitude

which somehow eluded you

on this side of the earth?

Perhaps you speak now in ways

I cannot hope to understand:

the repeating parentheses

of gently falling snow,

insistent pulse of a birch tapping

against the window glass,

sudden shock of a crow wing torn

and frozen to the sidewalk.

You, who saved up your words

like trinkets for a rainy day,

offer no reply but this,

the space you have shaped

in your former image.

Or perhaps your silence has

become your song at last,

the one you had been secretly

rehearsing all along.