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.

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.

WHERENESS

 

I had never considered it that way --

the simple state of being in a particular time

and place -- until you let the word fall,

suspended between us, both strange and familiar.

Where else could one be?, I wondered.

You loved words that way, trying out the new,

settling on favorite phrases, turning them,

chewing on their shapes and sounds, following

their threads wherever they might lead.

Now, all those years having gone wherever

the years go, I can only be grateful that

my whereness and yours found each other,

however briefly, breathed the same air,

shared the same silences, laughed at the same

absurdities you couldn't help but challenge.

You demanded much but expected little,

your lack of faith in others a religion unto itself,

yet never questioning where we belonged,

and never doubting that we would live forever.

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.

SUBTITLES

 

I don't know when it happened, but I have grown

too old or too lazy to read the subtitles of foreign movies,

snippets of dialogue scrolling across the bottom of

the television screen like a stock market ticker,

another language I can never hope to understand.

We used to watch them nearly every weekend,

caught the classics and the obscure at film festivals,

along with the old Hollywood variety, all those beautiful

made-up faces speaking as though they came from

nowhere in particular, a place we longed to be.

You always said that people should come with subtitles,

and -- most of us, at least -- with warning labels.

I sometimes wish for a translation of all the things

you did not say, every ellipses when you looked away,

though you are now beyond the world of words.

I do miss sharing a language, speaking in shorthand.

Last week, I let an old black-and-white movie run,

the sound turned down to a muffled whisper,

while I dozed off. I could comprehend the passion

well enough, occasional bursts of anger, the wariness

that men and women always bring to each other.

I could understand it this way, the sudden slamming

of a door, sad eyes gazing from a cloudy cafe window,

the rushing toward a train, its smoke a signature.

I could imagine then how it all worked out.

LEARNING TO SWEAR

I didn't speak much as a child, though 

I learned early, as we all did, which words 

to avoid saying, even if muttered under our breath,

stepping carefully around them,

like broken glass littering the sidewalk,

referring to them, if compelled to,

only by their first letter or two. They were words,

mostly of bodily  function, that came with

punishment, words that got your mouth 

washed out with soap.

Later, I tried them out on my tongue,

alone in my room, foreign words,

oddly shaped and sharp, the sound of them

vaguely startling, even when unattached

to any particular meaning or context.

Last week, my daughter pleaded 

to learn a swear word in Finnish, which

I foolishly gave in to, a small stone

that will eventually be thrown 

back at me.

But since she was born, I have been trying

to unlearn the lazy and the vulgar,

leaving the slings and arrows 

to Shakespeare,

and those more clever with speech than me.

I want more praise, more praise,

less cursing of the gods we continually implore.

I want her to know -- and to know 

myself -- that I revere

this most ordinary of lives,

with its drudgery and inconsistencies, its shifting language 

which can never describe it all,

its welcoming silence at beginning and end.