DREAMING OF OLD JOBS

 

We still dream of those old jobs, the ones leading only to the next shift, the next break, the next paycheck and day off, to rest and to worry, and start it all over again. Those jobs that we gave so many years to follow us like ghosts, tracking us down in our anxious sleep, as if we had left one detail or another unfinished, forgot to lock up or turn the thermostat down. The waitress balances her tray of trembling water glasses two decades after she has retired, a cacophony of voices still calling out their orders. The bus driver turns his oversized wheel onto a street with neither a name nor discernable stops. Your mother still packs shells at the munitions plant ten hours a day, and your brother tears sheets of steel from the shearing machine into eternity, tiny stars of metal glinting beneath his skin. While you stand on the loading dock of a crumbling factory, ringing the service bell again and again. It's so early the birds are not yet stirring, the winter darkness folding in around you. But you have been here long enough. If no one answers this time, you think, you'll force yourself to wake, and be gone.

UNCLE WILLARD

 

Uncle Willard's hands were shaped much like

my mother's, though larger, with flat-tipped fingers

able to reach and find what my mother called

those fancy chords on the neck of his red guitar,

hollow-bodied -- a box, some players called it --

beautiful and mysterious to the eyes of a young child,

too shy to sing but eager to gather those secrets.

He'd come by on Saturdays, or Sunday after church,

to our place in the housing projects, asking

if she wanted to do some picking, over coffee,

knowing already that she did -- of course she did.

It was only later, much later, that my mother

told me how he had made the trip to the hospital

when I was born, after Dr. Sergeant -- the man

who had delivered her other four babies

and remembered them all by name -- told her

that I was dying, unable to gather and hold

enough oxygen, that I would not last the night.

He arrived, mom said, well past visiting hours, with

his guitar, and his worn and annotated Bible,

anointed my head with oil -- for he was a preacher

as much as a player -- reading passages of scripture,

praying the long autumn hours into morning;

and I am sorry now that I did not speak to him of

this during his lifetime; I am sorry that I have waited

all these years -- decades of unintended silence --

simply to thank him for drawing from my small lips

those first few gasping attempts at song.

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.

THE UNSPOKEN

 

Part of Uncle Silas always resided in absence, the quiet and the still, his handsome face just off to the side in old photographs, gazing over his shoulder into the distance, or down at the solemn and familiar earth, smiling slightly, as if some joke or pleasantry had been spoken between them. Unlike my father, he took the cure for booze at the clinic in Duluth, telling no one, returning weeks later, clean-shaven and rested, as though he had merely driven to the grocery store and back. When he married, later in life, he didn't bother to inform the family, so averse was he to drawing attention to himself. He worked at the hospital up in Hibbing, learning the secret language of blood through the thumbnail lens of a microscope. He called it a dance. When ALS came to rob him of his touch, and then his speech, his limbs hardening like the branches of a weathered tree, he retreated further. I can see his sturdy frame receding, folding into itself, can see the old black-and-white television flickering, the news already old somehow. I can see the newspapers he could no longer hold stacked up beside him, all those words and faces gone blank, all those stories -- like his own -- waiting to be told.

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.

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.

By Ear

 

Sometimes, when I am writing, and I can't

quite hear the words in my mind, I speak them --

quietly -- so as not to frighten them away,

listening for the gentle resonance

of vowel sounds repeating themselves,

calling out to one another in a language of air,

their small sheltering caves echoing.

I listen for the well intentioned but uninvited,

the idea lacking grace, the bum note;

and I am reminded at times of my mother

who learned to play guitar this way,

listening closely to the Grand Old Opry

and the Hit Parade coming through that old

wooden radio, like a temple glowing,

pausing her mother's 78s again and again,

lifting its needle and setting it down at the start

to catch what didn't want to be caught,

to pull forth a sound she could already hear.

Sometimes I need to be reminded of

how to listen deeply, of the line that runs

directly from ear to heart, bypassing

all else, the sound of a single strum and a single

voice alone in a room, as simple as that,

the way all good songs begin.