Showing posts with label Youth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Youth. Show all posts

Thursday, July 3, 2025

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.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

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.


Friday, March 21, 2025

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.


Saturday, February 8, 2025

THE LOST CITY

 


We pondered the popular myths of our childhood,
large and small, the blurred and grainy image
of Bigfoot walking through the woods,
so alone that we felt more sympathy than fear;
considered whether to spend our weekly allowance
on those X-ray glasses or sea monkeys
advertised in the backs of our comic books,
those other worlds of myth and muscle,
where humanity, which had been so foolish,
was always saved at the last possible moment.
We wondered, too, where all those planes
and ships had vanished, their signals lost forever,
while attempting to cross the Bermuda Triangle.
Wondered how many miles into the ocean
the lost city of Atlantis -- which we knew to be
true -- could be, and if one of us ever traveled there
in this lifetime without the other, how we might
send word back to the bright world above.
It's the way I speak to you now, brother,
through the weight and distance of all these years,
your reply moving slowly through the waves
while I wonder at the beauty of that city,
sparks of ancient light flashing against its glass,
a story, like you, I am not willing to let go.


Tuesday, January 21, 2025

GARAGE SALE

 

Someone, somewhere, has that missing arm
that snaps neatly into Barbie's shoulder;
someone can patch up those jeans, torn and frayed
by time, clean out that ancient coffee pot.
Someone needs an 8-track player in their Chevy,
a jar of random buttons, ball of rubber bands,
someone needs that painting of Jesus knocking
at the door, rays of gold light drifting out.
Someone can restring and tune that guitar.
Someone never read that book in high school,
or heard that album at the right time in their life.
Someone has looked everywhere for that,
then forgotten all about it, then looked again.
Someone has decided to take up bowling.
Someone can save that withering plant.
Someone has just the right photo -- graduation
or wedding portrait -- for that antique frame,
its tarnished brass edges pointing outward
like stars, its bed of black felt empty beneath
the dusty glass, waiting for someone to step inside,
turn on the lights, claim their rightful place.


Monday, January 13, 2025

ONE YEAR AFTER YOUR DEATH

 

The winter sky reflects the river today,
as it always does this time of year,
each gray-blue sheet of ice
indistinguishable from the other.
The narrow shadows lengthen, drawing
fenceposts around the empty spaces.
Everything becomes clinical fact,
every step taken a punctuation mark,
though what has been said and what has
been left out remain unclear,
hovering like my breath before me.
How is it that I cannot see you now, yet
feel you closer than this wind,
this hardened earth, the bare limbs
of trees reaching like roots in reverse?
All I know today is that we are not made
merely of things that happened --
for better or worse -- nor the way
we smiled, or didn't, in an old photograph;
we are closer, I say, to the light itself
coming through the dusty window blinds,
holding us there, frozen as this day,
making us believe we are the subject,
that we are the ones standing still.


Friday, December 27, 2024

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.

Friday, December 13, 2024

REQUIEM IN WINTER

 


The last hands to touch you were not mine, nor those of any friend or lover, but the powder-blue latex gloves of paramedics, helplessly shaking you, tapping at your thin neck and wrist, while a deputy sheriff -- whose shoulder had broken in the door -- stood by, as if your small body sleeping in your own bed were a crime. Part of me must have stayed in that bed we once shared, but no part that could have saved you. Have we let you down, allowing you to leave this way? How could any of us have known all the different definitions of alone? The last hands to touch you lifted you cleanly from this life, wheeled you out and up the narrow stairs we climbed a thousand times. My mind cannot fathom more -- not the coroner's cooling board and creaking drawer, not the scalpel used to search for what was already gone. So I leave you here, where it is always the same cold morning in January, the door frame hanging like a broken cross in the entryway, and you tucked beneath a fresh white blanket like a child, almost smiling. A flock of wild turkeys has wandered up the bluff; the sky is so bright it blinds.

Thursday, December 12, 2024

STEMS AND VINES

 


I didn't know the names of most,
other than the obvious, but I would take my time in that small corner shop
at Victoria and Grand, as if I had a plan,
pulling together a wild array
of color and design, jagged stars
and spears of shifting green,
delicate faces receding into their
velvety folds, varieties you might not
expect to find side by side,
but that made sense to my willfully
uneducated eye, bringing them
home to surprise you with.
Though you tended to eschew tradition
of all kinds, you allowed me this
bit of old-fashioned courting,
a word I have since grown to love,
the shy earnestness and ritual behind it,
its long, noble history, the eternal doorstep
we eventually come to, hoping for entry.
Those days are long gone,
as are you, and there's nowhere
to bring you flowers now,
no patch of earth or marbled stone,
not even a vase upon this dusty bookshelf.
The shadows here move without shape;
the wind crowded with your absence.
I wish I could remember
the names of those flowers now,
each spectacular species from another world.
They would be my words, as my words
in turn would bloom for you,
dark and glistening with the earth,
declaring, in no small measure,
everything you must already know.

Sunday, December 8, 2024

ONE SUMMER EVENING

 


I had forgotten
that it was raining
outside;
I had forgotten
even that there was
an outside,
sitting there with
you, waiting for
it to pass.


Friday, December 6, 2024

GOVERNMENT CHEESE


We knew we were poor, clad in our secondhand outfits, forever shaped to someone else's frame, the bangs of our unruly hair trimmed to a high and crooked fringe by the uncertain hand of our mother. But we knew, occasionally, the joy of opening that oblong box of cardboard, the newness of its smell, silver foil gleaming within, brighter than a handful of freshly washed coins. We would tear into it with haste, cut a jagged slice with a butter knife, then another, never making a straight line. We never asked where it came from or why, though we gave thanks, as always, before wolfing down our grilled cheese and tomato soup, the finest I've had to this day. It was a delicacy lost to many, but not on us peasant kids, smiling our greasy smiles, wiping our mouths with the backs of our hands before racing out into the world again.

 

Friday, November 15, 2024

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.

Sunday, October 20, 2024

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.

Monday, October 14, 2024

THE LAST K-MART

 


The last K-Mart department store in the country
is closing today, and I am reminded suddenly
of those long-ago Saturday afternoons, following
my brother along the forbidden shortcut
through the tall grass and weeds which ran
alongside the junkyard, fresh quarters in hand
for finishing our weekend chores, to be quickly spent
on some small novelty, or if we had pooled
our money, a new hamster to replace the one we
had just buried, our first undeniable shock
at the fleetingness of this world and all it holds.
I am reminded, too, of my brother's name
for the store: Came-Apart, which never failed
to make us laugh, remember back-to-school shopping
with our tired mother, the generic Trax sneakers
and stiff, creased denim of Husky jeans, which
became the tell-tale wardrobe of welfare kids and
project brats -- which is to say, many of us.
I remember blue light specials in the cafeteria,
and our family TV and sofa on layaway.
I wonder what will become of the gumball stands,
the rusted merry-go-round and plastic pony
outside the entrance that you could sit atop for a nickel,
dreaming of faraway prairies and open sky.
No doubt they will be hauled away for the indignity
of the landfill, or to some industrial warehouse,
while my brother sleeps the same silent sleep
that he has mastered for more than twenty years,
not far from here, not far from anywhere.
When last I checked, that shortcut was still there.


Sunday, September 29, 2024

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.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

GUPPIES

 

Nothing grew in that drab one-bedroom
apartment, gray-blue light cast from the swerving
freeway below, the old service road following
beside it like a shadow, then turning
with a half-hearted shrug, a sad aquarium
of ordinary days circling, reflecting,
measuring themselves against us.
You moved the plants from one window
to another, hung them in the kitchen,
then the bathroom, fed them on eggshells
and coffee grounds -- all to no avail,
their brown and brittle ghosts too weary
to drift away, littering the floor and windowsills.
When we came back from that day trip
to the lake, the guppies you had just bought
were floating on the surface of the water,
their small incandescent bodies motionless,
tailfins like flames sputtered out, yet still glowing;
we knew, separately, without having to say,
that something larger had ended.
You left, at a ridiculous hour of the night,
a time normally reserved for old blues songs,
and weeks later, I did too, filling every bag
and suitcase with all the emptiness I could claim.
Even now, I wonder why we chose that place,
whether in hope or desperation; even now,
I wonder in what other rooms,
what other lives, we might have survived.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

SECOND GHAZAL FOR TRISH

 

There's no burying you, no risk of forgetting;
though you would say the past is merely escape.
Whatever truce you made with life was brief,
its tentative agreements offering you no escape.
We were so young, what could we have known?
But I knew, even then, that love was more than escape.
Some days we read for hours, daylight shifting.
You said that poetry was the opposite of escape.
It was, we imagined, you and me against the world,
until the world itself managed to escape.
In the end, you pulled away from everyone,
your stubborn isolation a poor imitation of escape.
The prayer I offer now is one of silence,
the unspoken understanding of no escape.

Friday, August 16, 2024

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.

Saturday, July 20, 2024

THE AFTERNOON SHE DID NOT DIE

 


Well, we go on -- one hand floating weightless as a balloon,
the body pulling itself downward again.
Our bones can only be lifted so much by this wind,
and the ocean is so vast before us.
Though a residue remains, like soot from
a long-neglected fire or a thumbprint on the soul,
and it belongs the way a bruise belongs,
the way our shadows spark and smolder without us,
solitary, when shut away for the night.
Today I walk with neither haste nor direction,
the sex and the sorrow of sad letter days
discarded, the fact of my name, age, and profession
lost to the angular wind. I carry your words
in one pocket, your silence in the other,
past the once-familiar storefronts of our past,
the soft glow of your childlike face gazing back at me
and back upon itself, a foreign postage stamp
on an antique postcard you bought but never sent.
How can I answer now, knowing this business of words,
this stooge's religion, to be diversion at best?
How can I speak when addressing you now means
addressing any tree, or cloud, or patch of grass?
You have grown vast by way of vanishing.
You always said it was an art, a trick you could not unlearn.
But we go on, each in our separate ways.
Our bones can only be lifted so much by this wind.
But the body is such a stubborn guest,
unwilling to leave, despite the late hour.
We may as well settle in, make up the spare room.


Popular Poems