DENOMINATION BLUES

 

When my mother found Jesus again,

after narrowly surviving death by her own hand,

she began opening doors to seemingly every

church which may have housed him there.

She refused to recognize the Catholic church,

which placed a pope between oneself and the Lord,

praying to people and statues, while Lutherans

were simply too formal and reserved.

The Primitive Baptists believed that to enter

into the Kingdom you must also wash the feet

of others, as the Lord himself had done,

become a servant to the servant among us.

But there was no music there, and didn't

the psalms themselves command us to make

a joyful noise unto the Lord, loud enough

to be heard out there among the stars?

The Seventh Day Adventists seemed kind and

welcoming enough, but my brother and I protested

missing our Saturday morning cartoons.

What my mother truly loved, and where she felt

at home, was listening in earnest to those

fire and brimstone sermons, what she called

the old time religion, which threatened continually

the burning, lashing, and gnashing of teeth.

She would nod in agreement, strangely

comforted by the litany of righteous violence,

of Jesus returning next time with a sword.

She was happy to not be amongst those left,

waking on Judgement Day to find a world strange

and unwelcoming, hovering between life and

death, with no way then of repentance

or altering the course of all that was to come.

CHANGING THE ENDING

 

How many of those old children's tales

have I found myself editing and adding to

while reading to my young daughter?

How many children were spared at the last from

becoming some cretin's favorite meal,

how many kindly animals saved from the axe?

What kind of mother sells her kids to the gypsies?

What kind of father could somehow be talked

into leaving his children alone in the woods,

hungry and terrified, with only the birds

and breadcrumbs to help lead them home?

Even poor Francis, that inquisitive and mischievous

badger, was threatened with a spanking

for failing to fall asleep on command, with me,

grudgingly, having to explain the meaning

of the word, so foreign was the idea in our home.

Things are very different in this telling of ours,

a world apart from that of her father's.

One day, perhaps, she may understand how

I somehow altered my own narrative, and

therefore hers, simply by being the father who

stayed, who chose to do so every moment.

Though there are still many days when I long

to change the story, if only by slowing it down,

pausing before the next turn of the page.

Every small moment has somehow become

my favorite, every adventure the greatest one yet.

I am only beginning to understand, dear reader,

and I confess, I never want this story to end.

A ROLL OF FILM

 

Who knows how many years it lay hidden,

slumbering in that corner of the desk drawer,

framed within its oak walls and shadow,

time slowly unspooling in either direction

around it, the constellations of dust

forming and reforming in a world which

from here must seem only a rumor.

When I retrieved them from the photo shop,

there wasn't much to see -- shapeless

clusters of dark and light merging uneasily,

bursts of summer sun breaking through,

or what might have been a face, or a shoulder,

impossible to distinguish one from the other.

This is the way of all memory, I imagine.

But one image survived to show you,

standing in the doorway, your back turned

to the camera, that long black coat

concealing your frame, Christmas lights

on the tree blurred as if in motion.

I like to think you were smiling, your unshaven

face tilted slightly to one side, half hidden,

your secrets, as always, held closely.

From this distance, it is impossible to tell

if you were leaving or just arriving,

so fitting for you, brother, who could not

stay here long, but waited patiently

until today to pass through once more.

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.