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.

MY GRANDFATHER'S DAY BOOK

 

Worn and dappled with age, it creaks slightly upon opening, must in its creases, a small narrow door leading immediately into the past. The winding blue script within -- all of it in Finnish -- I can only translate in part, a reminder that language, like memory, can only take us so far. What is left out of this ledger -- this list of dates, facts, and figures -- must write its own story elsewhere. There is no listing for the cost of whiskey and cigarettes, no mention of the son drowned on the other side of the world, nor the wife who followed soon after, no price mentioned for the arsenic that took her. The margins are narrow. There is room only for what he is willing to record, that which makes sense and can be easily measured. I don't know where my own days stand, so many squandered with laziness, the stubborn refusal of youth, so many unaccounted for. I know only that their shadow grows long, no matter which direction I stand. If I am found lacking, grandfather, let these words be a start, let my debt be paid in the telling.

FAST

 

You were always so fast, brother, even when we

were just kids back in the housing projects;

couldn't sit still, your limbs constantly fidgeting,

growing long and quick seemingly overnight,

your lankiness slowly turning into grace.

You were always in pursuit of something else,

something new, risky, while I, the annoying kid brother,

could never keep up, tagging along though I did,

daydreaming, awkward within my own skin.

You drank your first beer, kissed your first girl,

unclasped your first bra as though there was no time

to lose, as though they were the only things

that mattered in a life you could already see drawing

to a close, as though you were on a timeline

the rest of us could neither see nor understand.

When you said, as casually as though commenting

on the weather, that you'd never make it to forty,

I put it down to the whiskey, the dark romance of youth.

Only now, gone so many years, do you linger,

speaking openly as you rarely did before, no need

to rush, or to leave out any detail in the telling.

There is no road. We walk now side by side.

GRIEF

The usual messengers arrived to do their worst, kicked your name back and forth as if they knew you, speaking words that were better spoken by you years before. The first told me that you might be home if I stopped by, reading or sleeping; it was only my timing that was off. The next one put on a faceless mask, said I should have been there, should have called, if only to talk of the weather or old times. One cursed you and raged, as I did, against your selfishness, your carelessness with all of those pills. Another fed me only sorrow, bitter and familiar, like the whiskey of my youth. Yet another pressed the old apartment keys into my palm, hard; gave me a stack of books you didn't have time to read. They came and they went, never when they were expected, talked and argued over each other for weeks, then months. None of them listened. None of them told me the name of the one they had kept hidden, that last visitor called Gratitude, which had been there all along, waiting only for me to turn, to raise my hand and testify. To stand.

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.