ODE TO MESABA CO-OP PARK

 

Back then, there were places where our feet

could not freely walk, where our bodies

could not stand without standing apart from those

some would deem polite society,

our eyes and broken speech giving us away,

patched overalls with a tie on Sunday mornings.

They put up signs: No Indians or Finns Allowed.

They called us Reds, Commies, Jackpine Savages,

called us Barbarians, wearing only our flesh

from sauna to lake shore, steam rising like a thousand

unsettled ghosts, speaking a language full of

closed doors to outsiders, the clicks and

clacks of birds and fallen branches.

Some of us still believed in God, though our sin

was having dared to question the ruling class, dared --

like young Twist -- to humbly ask for more.

But we made our spaces sacred through sweat.

We built a floor on which to dance,

a schoolhouse so our children could learn,

placed our chairs up in the trees, high enough to see

the black sedans of federal agents below,

our minds drifting with the untethered clouds.

Back then, we were dangerous, we were other,

reluctant revolutionaries in this new land,

wanting only to live our quiet working lives.

But sometimes the rabble needs to be roused,

the earth itself shaken from slumber,

the forest called to by name until it answers

in kind, until it invites you as family, and as friend,

its open door leading you gently further in.

VINTAGE

 

I have reached the age when walking into

the local Goodwill feels like nothing so much as

a time capsule of every childhood store

I once wandered, unaccompanied, losing myself among

the latest shoes and clothes, the novelties,

televisions and stereos my family could never

have afforded, days when the mall was a great city

of the mind, and the better half of a day could be lost

thumbing the racks at Great American Music.

I have become, along with my once-youthful peers,

and every generation before us -- vintage,

a word we never would have uttered as kids,

clad in our secondhand polyester pants, creeping

above our ankles, our threadbare sweaters

and enormous collars, nothing ever fitting quite right.

But here are the parachute pants and windbreakers

I once longed for, those white Nike sneakers

with the red logo that all the bratty UMC kids had,

the leather jacket I paid next to nothing for.

I think also of you, my love, how you could always

find something of worth to be reclaimed,

a jumper, a blouse, or dress to mix and match

with something at home, an unexpected pairing,

as perhaps we were all those years ago,

complimenting each other before irrevocably clashing.

I think of the racks of cotton and rayon removed

from your closets, faux fur and pencil skirts,

baubles, beads, and broaches packed up and driven

from your empty apartment to the thrift store.

I see some things you might have liked,

but I'm not buying, just passing through today,

having run this last errand on your behalf,

the bright January sun offering precious little

warmth, casting its unwavering glare in my rearview.

PRESENCE

 

Everywhere I look, you

are not there.

Yet when I cease

all looking, you

appear, as clear and

undeniable

as your absence.

YOUR OBITUARY

I am reading your obituary, calmly, by lamplight,

as if it were merely a poem I came across

in these old papers -- not the mundane list of facts,

dates, and names of survivors which we have

cobbled together on your behalf, and of which

you would most certainly disapprove --

but the one you wrote, long ago, for your

college writing class, when you were so young

and such an exercise must have seemed amusing,

a mere novelty to be redrafted and played with.

In this telling, you have become the survivor

of your own demise, able to alter, delete,

and transform the details of your life, just as you

liked to do when you were in the midst of it.

No one liked a good story more than you.

So, I am reading of your birth across the Atlantic,

how your very identity was kept a secret

before you were sent by steamship to be raised

by film stars deep in the Hollywood hills.

It's a tale you could almost make me believe,

and one that you certainly wished were so.

You are no longer here to say, your narrative lost

among the silence that now becomes a kind

of signature -- everything you have left

out, by choice or chance, or simple forgetfulness,

the once-red ink on brittle pages receding from view.

The ocean hums. Your fiction is safe with me.

LOST FOR WORDS

You loved, in those long ago days, to discover
new words and phrases, slipping them into a poem
or a simple note taped to the refrigerator door,
so that I -- unassuming student -- would inevitably
reach for your old college dictionary, standing
upright in the dusty kitchen window sill.
Nights we whiled away with the warm flush
of bourbon, cutthroat games of Scrabble, scrutinizing
and solving the world's problems one by one.
In the morning, more often than not,
your post-it notes covered the bathroom mirror,
bright yellow flags stamped with your precise cursive,
your sudden insights and asides, inside jokes,
things to remember, things to forget,
a small "I love you" to start the work day.
So strange, then, that you have left with neither
goodbye nor instruction, only the dull fact
of your absence saturating every page,
every secret space from curtain fold to closet.
I am reading outside of your lines now,
the best I can, one silence intersecting with another,
piecing together one version of you to one
I cannot quite comprehend -- nervous, as I was
back then, to share my lines with you.
What word might you offer if you could, what coin
for safe passage from this winter without color,
without snow, this world without you in it?
I am only learning to speak in this uncertain air.
I am, I must confess, at a loss.

BETWEEN THE WARS

You always said that you were born into the wrong era -- the age of intangible monetization and the quick fix, of information without wisdom, and sex without intimacy, the age of self-branding and dumbing down. You still liked an old-fashioned date and an old-fashioned drink, talking long into the night about books and movies, the kind of music they just didn't make anymore, casually stating your many opinions as though long-settled fact. You loved most Paris between the wars, the lost generation living just outside the mainstream, and those angry young men in England trudging through their working class lives in bleak sepia and gray, and the beautiful façade of Hollywood in the 40s -- a nation unto itself -- the high waists and low-tilted hats, the clipped and razor-sharp dialogue of no discernible accent, lines you could have easily written yourself. You wanted, simply, to be elsewhere, corresponding by hand on fine cream-colored vellum -- the one small luxury you would allow yourself -- signing off in your witty, offhand way, anxiously awaiting reply, and never using a word as gauche as Goodbye, not even once.

NOW THAT YOU HAVE FLOWN

Now that you have flown from your body,

flown as if every hidden room within were burning

behind and beneath you, flown as if the life

you were fleeing somehow depended upon it,

I remember your body as it once was:

small, resilient, open to love and to touch,

smelling of summer sun, of sweat-salt

and sweet musk, the residue of perfumed candles

left unattended on the dresser all night.

I think of your thin fingers laced between mine,

the very simplicity of their union, and how

our bodies folded into one another during sleep,

then shifted, drifting apart like continents

inching slowly toward their separate worlds.

But you were always an escape artist

in training -- never content with the vehicle

you were granted in this life, walking

slightly out of step beside it, or pulling it

behind you like a child's Radio Flyer.

You wanted most, you said, to be merely a mind,

or at least the spirit that lays claim to it.

You quarreled with it, punished it with bourbon

and precision neglect, forgave it grudgingly,

if not yourself -- an argument only you understood.

But now that you have flown from all of this,

painless and weightless at last, I can touch you

only in my thoughts, can see you and speak

to you only in these lines, rising like the thinnest

plumes of smoke, drawing the shape of a bird,

then of a woman, then a bird once more,

dissipating, wisp by wisp, into air.