SNAPSHOTS OF MY GRANDPARENTS, CIRCA 1947

 

for Nels and Tyyne Natus

They lean into each other, almost imperceptibly, as two old drunks, long familiar with one another, often will, partly out of love, partly out of habit. They wear neither their Saturday clothes nor their Sunday best, he in plaid farmer's jacket and frayed cap, her hat tilted like a lazy flower to one side of her bronze-tinted hair. Their smiles look slightly weary, as if lacking the energy to rise fully above the surface. But this seems to be a moment on which they could agree -- no arguments here, no shouting in the old language or the new -- years before she chose the arsenic over the simplicity of sunlight, before the cancer carved through him a path which no living thing could ever hope to travel. In this moment, the silence is not pointed but as gentle as the smoke which surrounds them, bringing them somehow closer, their pale eyes narrowed slightly against the light.

BEFORE THE TOWERS FELL

 

New York that summer was a city half-hidden

behind miles of scaffolding, everything seemingly

being sandblasted, repainted, and refitted,

every rooftop and arch, every window

reaching upward toward a sky of shifting blue,

strangely calm above the grime and clatter of it all.

Walls of glass reflected the bodies of workers,

like the saints framed in the windows of

the crumbling cathedral across from our hotel.

Mostly I remember walking, from one borough

to the next, the city blocks so brief compared to those

seemingly endless boulevards of the Midwest,

the sights, sounds, and smells of a dozen countries

around every corner. I remember stopping for

lunch at the Empire Diner, drinks at the KGB,

remember the famous dancer that you recognized

from a movie sliding gracefully into an SUV,

as though part of a larger routine which no one

on the street had been made aware of.

We walked with aching hips and bandaged heels,

as though tourism was, in fact, as serious

a sport as any, as if youth demanded motion.

Tonight, on yet another bleak anniversary,

I listen, with the others, to the silence, gazing up

at those blue columns of light, as though

they were somehow holding up the sky itself;

I think of the two we once were... before.

Such a small and simple word that must bear,

against all odds, the weight of the unimaginable.

Were we walking into the past all along,

the evening sun beside us reflected a thousand

different ways, yet impossible to pin down?

When did distance itself become destination,

our paths reaching, like those long pillars

of light, separately, into what we could not say?

Where, dear friend, did we go?

FIRST GRADE

 

The autumn moved in seemingly overnight,

its gray and watery chill seeping through

the windows while we slept. Suddenly,

the glittering Ferris wheel of the State Fair

has stopped for yet another year,

the green of lawns and hills grows less certain,

the leaves already folding in on themselves

like small hands clutching at the air;

and we stand, my daughter, her mother,

and me, in the hallway of this new school,

the light strangely familiar, as though bottled

from decades past and just opened again.

Our daughter is smiling but nervous,

her suntanned arms at her sides as she turns

with uncertainty, chin held tightly against her chest,

as if trying to find a doorway into herself.

But she turns instead toward this classroom,

her backpack comically large, her bag of supplies

so heavy that she pulls it at her side;

and we, her parents, turn with the ringing

of the bell, so startling in its insistence,

to leave, as ever, in our separate directions.

But of course we, too, are being pulled

forward, together, into all that we could not

have planned, the beauty, the boredom,

and wonder of this great unknown.

THE ANIMAL PHILOSOPHER

 

Walking with my young daughter to school,

she asks, seemingly out of nowhere,

"What are words anyway?

They don't mean anything, really.

What is a girl, or a tree, or the ocean?

To an animal, the words we use are just

sounds like any other sound."

And I, who have spent the better part

of a lifetime believing in the beauty

and possibility of language, of building these

small temples of measured sound,

can offer no reasonable defense against

such a pure distillation of truth.

Have I been exposed as a mere hack,

a mild mannered charlatan? I am strangely,

secretly wounded when she throws

out the question of ages: "Why are we here?

No one knows. The animals would know

because they were here long before humans.

We can't really understand their language

yet; but we could learn if we listened."

Which is all her father, poor simpleton, can

manage today, tagging along, listening

to all that we need not say.

BODY, WORK

 

In the morning, slowly stirring into wakefulness

and reasonably good sense, muscles

stirring, uncoiling, it is sometimes difficult

to tell if we are, in fact, mostly body,

or not the body at all. Only moments before,

hovering between those two incongruous

worlds, we seemed just fine without it.

Yet only weeks ago, when my head hit the hardwood

floor as mindless as a fist, only the matter

of matter was felt, or needed,

a not-so-gentle reminder of the humility

required before the fact of one's own flesh.

I am thinking, too, of a friend in California who

speaks in reverent tones of body work,

her hands having touched and touched again

the shoulders, backs, and ribcages of

hundreds, working circles into those hidden caves

previously unknown until the pain spoke

a little louder. rattled the locks nearly loose.

If I am being honest, I must admit to

envying her unequivocal love for every form,

of not seeing any as broken, or even flawed,

merely wondrous, as they must be.

Another friend tells recently of leaving the body

entirely during deep meditation, his wife

and children calling out for him, the corridors

of his own slender frame suddenly so small

that he feared he might not be able to return.

I, of course, want to believe in both --

the body at last finding its way toward

acceptance upon this earth, at home within itself,

rooted and admired as any tree along the river,

while the spirit, wild as ever, grows so

expansive that the gods themselves must shift

to make room, turning away like the lazy lovers

we always suspected them to be.

NOTES AFTER A BLACKOUT

For days -- then weeks -- after the fall,

when those sudden waves of dizziness would

arise with even the smallest of movements,

and turning over in bed meant pulling

the whole lopsided world up beside me

as well, I found myself practicing gassho after

a long and lazy absence -- first in my

mind's eye, then placing my palms together

just above heart level, centering, centering,

denying the duality of left and right,

up and down, false gravity pulling me

in both directions at once. It surprised me,

this seemingly inadvertent reverence, as if I had

been granted a small offering of grace,

the unassuming dignity of walking slowly,

cautiously from one room to the next.

I felt a measure of kindness to the bruised and

swollen face gazing back from the medicine

cabinet mirror -- face that here needed neither

explanation nor apology -- the same face that

had been waiting there for all this time.

TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS AT FUNERALS

 

It was, my cousin reminds me, once quite common for one family member or another to snap a photograph of their loved one in final repose, a keepsake to be placed among the golden locks of hair, the bronzed baby shoes, and that tiny bracelet that somehow fit on your grandmother's wrist. They would not have minded, we would like to imagine, going as they were before the Maker in their Sunday finest, faces freshly painted and powdered, sunken cheeks glowing rosy once again. In childhood, those images never failed to startle, while thumbing the thick pages of the family album -- the scene shifting suddenly from kids laughing through the candlelit glow of birthday cake, or your mother holding your sister next to a dog whose name no one can recall, to a waxen, expressionless face peering above a casket's satin pillows, its exterior dark and final. It seemed ghoulish, and perhaps selfish, the need for that one final image of one who could neither smile nor offer consent. But perhaps such clinging is not unreasonable. Perhaps I am no different, telling this to you, conjuring with words the unreliable visages of the past, endlessly attempting to name and reclaim a part of the world that has long since departed.