ELEGY FOR MY NIECE

 

I was surprised that you came to visit

that morning in my dream, having departed

this world so suddenly only days before;

but there you were, lying peacefully outside

the plate glass window of that musty basement

apartment I had not entered in years.

Your eyes were bright and smiling, bearing

no weight or bruising from within,

no residue of the earthly sorrow which you tried

continually to numb, to bury, to exchange

for another's on the installment plan

of what became your life. You were just a kid

at that moment, as you had always been,

lounging without care in the long summer grass,

nothing but sunlight and time holding you.

Yet when I stepped slowly toward you,

you floated backward, pulled like a stage prop,

the space between us immovable, solid

as a body neither of us could see or lay claim to;

and when I reached to touch the glass

you were already gone, carried on waves

of what I could not know or save you from.

Dear niece, dear Ophelia, forgive my absence,

for staying on this dry island of earth,

as if these long silent roads were my own,

as if I had any idea where any of them

might eventually lead.

JASPER

 

When I was a kid, I felt invisible more often

than not -- sometimes through a combination

of will and imagination, and sometimes

through the unseeing eyes of adults,

voices prone to shouting, from the kitchen

or the living room, "Get those kids

out of here! I can't hear myself think."

It was good, then, to have a vanishing act,

to know when to slip away, and when to stay gone.

Now that I am growing older,

gray, unassuming, fumbling for

my reading glasses, I again

feel myself becoming part of the unseen

or what my mother and aunts

used to refer to as a Jasper,

that eternal stranger passing through, ostensibly

harmless, whose name no one could recall.

There's no loneliness like a crowd,

and while this is neither comfort

not revelation, it is not without advantages.

In the coffee shop, I order without

small talk, I sit, off to the side, sketching a few words

the way an artist might sketch

a tree, a cloud, a figure in the distance

a world I may enter, as I always have, disturbing

no one in my coming or going.

WITHOUT

 

Some absences

take up so much room;

some silences

have grown too large

to leave the way

they came in.

CIRCLE ROUTES

 

The Canada geese this morning

are plodding in weary circles

along the side of the road,

one after the other, waiting for

this gray Autumn rain to lift

to begin their long flight

back to where they started from.

SECONDHAND

 

I suppose that I should have been more grateful

for the everyday lessons in transience,

the irrefutable truth that nothing in this life

is ever ours to begin with, only on loan,

and that the end result of all this accumulation

is, inevitably, dispersal. But when you're a kid,

and coolness matters most, the tell-tale uniform

of the poor weighs upon your shoulders

and limbs, the shushing sound of those shapeless

polyester pants, as if you were being erased,

your movements tentative, your steps slightly out of sync.

Nothing ever seemed to fit quite right,

as my own form seemed ill-suited for its design,

growing up and out, lumbering from room

to quiet room, from one pulse of air to another.

But the dog-eared books, yellowing already,

the worn and scuffed record albums

handed down from an older brother or sister

were always a blessing, tangible portals

to a thousand different realms, lives both mysterious

and mundane, which I could add to my own,

wandering through it all unscathed.

The teachers, with few exceptions, took

little notice, handed me down to the next level

of learning, and the next. My mother, too,

seemed already worn out with it all,

hardly interested in raising any of us, eager

to pass us down to a world hovering between

ambivalence and constant danger.

But we had been studying, albeit humbly,

unnoticed, shifting in and out of view, letting go

again and again. We would be ready.

A SUDDEN DOWNPOUR

 

The sky opens without warning, as it will

this time of year, while a woman races across

the parking lot of a local department store,

weighted bags on either shoulder, her two

young children holding up the hem of her long

summer dress as though it were a tent.

I can hear the lilt of their voices rising

to meet their mother's, hear the wet slapping

of their flip-flops against the pavement;

and I can hear their laughter ringing out

between words, a sound that is easily understood

in any language, welcoming this sudden storm.

This is only rain, after all, not the hot metal

of bombs, no more to be feared than the sound

of their breathing or names spoken aloud.

For now, their mother keeps the sky away.

For now, this is all the shelter they will need.

ROGER

 

They said you were trouble even back then,

hanging from the highest ledge

you could find, cadging smokes from

the older boys, proud to add a new curse word

to your ever-expanding arsenal.

I knew only that you were my friend,

no better or worse than the rest of us project brats,

in and out of the system, wandering our

small world freely, mostly without consequence,

scavengers and explorers not expected

home until the blue-tinged halos of

streetlights flickered up and down the block.

Years later, visiting our foster mother

for what would be the last time,

I asked about you, and where you might be.

"Oh," she sighed, as if blowing out

a puff of imaginary smoke, while gazing

down at the gray-tinged sidewalk, "You don't

want to know about Roger. Believe me."

I knew that she meant jail, knew she meant

one wrong turn leading to another, and another,

until no escape route could be found,

I knew that she meant you never really stood

a chance, a born and raised statistic.

I made my own mistakes, neither unique

nor decisive -- but I am still here

to speak of you, to remember your wildness

as the innocence it was, your laughter

pure as you raced through the ditch grass,

rough stars from the sticker bushes

clinging to your skinny ankles, running simply

for the sake of running, or maybe

just to show the rest of us

where that trampled path might lead.