THIS FUMBLING

 

Nonetheless, morning comes,

as it always does.

I wake before dawn,

feed the cat, pour my coffee

into a Ball jar, unaware

that you have left this world

sometime in the night.

The radiator makes a creaking

sound; the phone is silent.

This fumbling, this calm unknowing

is in itself a small corner

of paradise I will recognize

only long after the fact,

when its comfort has moved

elsewhere, and I cannot

hope to enter again.

PARIS, 1911

 

We never made it to Paris, though the framed Steiglitz print of a rain-swept boulevard in that city -- everything gone gray, everything blowing to one side -- which hung for so long in our old apartment, is here with me now. The same thin tree, half-bare and bent beneath the weight of the sky, still reaches upward in defiance; the same street sweeper, shrouded from shoulders to ankles, stoops as though retrieving something dropped to the reflecting water below. The same shadowy figures and buggies in the distance continue to move slowly past. I can almost smell the rain through this curtain of years, can almost hear the whoosh and drumming of it, as if it were approaching us here today. For the moment, this scene rests in the narrow hallway which leads to the bedroom, awaiting the right wall, the right light. You, of course, are not here to ask; and on any wall, in any room, it seems only to get further and further away.

THE LAST K-MART

 

The last K-Mart department store in the country

is closing today, and I am reminded suddenly

of those long-ago Saturday afternoons, following

my brother along the forbidden shortcut

through the tall grass and weeds which ran

alongside the junkyard, fresh quarters in hand

for finishing our weekend chores, to be quickly spent

on some small novelty, or if we had pooled

our money, a new hamster to replace the one we

had just buried, our first undeniable shock

at the fleetingness of this world and all it holds.

I am reminded, too, of my brother's name

for the store: Came-Apart, which never failed

to make us laugh, remember back-to-school shopping

with our tired mother, the generic Trax sneakers

and stiff, creased denim of Husky jeans, which

became the tell-tale wardrobe of welfare kids and

project brats -- which is to say, many of us.

I remember blue light specials in the cafeteria,

and our family TV and sofa on layaway.

I wonder what will become of the gumball stands,

the rusted merry-go-round and plastic pony

outside the entrance that you could sit atop for a nickel,

dreaming of faraway prairies and open sky.

No doubt they will be hauled away for the indignity

of the landfill, or to some industrial warehouse,

while my brother sleeps the same silent sleep

that he has mastered for more than twenty years,

not far from here, not far from anywhere.

When last I checked, that shortcut was still there.

CHARLOTTE

 

Charlotte was well into her ninth decade,

with no plans for retirement, making,

slicing, and packing sandwiches

on the assembly line with the rest of us

poor souls -- perpetually bored teenagers,

dropouts, and functioning addicts trying to survive.

Her face was a wonder of lines intersecting

with lines, of worry and laughter,

one long and detailed story leading

imperceptibly into another; her skin, thin

as parchment, polished and shining

beneath the gray industrial light,

especially when she turned to smile.

Her beloved husband Frank had long since left

this life, while their children, and their children, had

grown and moved away, one to the east

and one far out west, remembering, most years,

to call at Christmas and her birthday.

"What would I do sitting at home alone?,"

she would ask to no one in particular,

answering herself with an exaggerated shrug.

Decades earlier, she had worked

at the ammunition plant not far from here,

alongside my aunt Anna Mae, counting

and packing machine gun shells for the war

six days a week, her hands perpetually

smelling of metal and oil for years.

This work was easier, much easier by far.

"Here I can eat what I make," she once quipped,

"and no one gets hurt, or killed -- just fed."

TO THE YOUNG WOMAN WEEPING WHILE DONATING PLASMA

 

I cannot know your story -- the river of time

and circumstance that brought you here

today -- only this slender moment of quiet

unraveling, weighted tears pooling and tumbling

from the corners of your almond eyes,

gray-blue and receding from view, your face --

so young -- bruised already from within.

Grief has come to claim you, this much is clear,

blurring your edges, as though submerged,

even in this clinical afternoon light;

grief gazes back, unblinking as the day itself

through the clouded lens of your phone.

The little I know, or at least pretend to believe,

I cannot speak, not wanting to be the unwelcome

stranger who pierces your necessary solitude.

I would not trouble you with all the heartaches

yet to come, as they most certainly will;

I would speak only of the moments between,

moments of ease and exhalation where

you could alter course, arranging possibilities

like so many books upon the shelf. I would

remind you simply to raise high the window blinds,

to leave the door ajar, so that when joy

returns, it will know just where to find you.

GUPPIES

 

Nothing grew in that drab one-bedroom

apartment, gray-blue light cast from the swerving

freeway below, the old service road following

beside it like a shadow, then turning

with a half-hearted shrug, a sad aquarium

of ordinary days circling, reflecting,

measuring themselves against us.

You moved the plants from one window

to another, hung them in the kitchen,

then the bathroom, fed them on eggshells

and coffee grounds -- all to no avail,

their brown and brittle ghosts too weary

to drift away, littering the floor and windowsills.

When we came back from that day trip

to the lake, the guppies you had just bought

were floating on the surface of the water,

their small incandescent bodies motionless,

tailfins like flames sputtered out, yet still glowing;

we knew, separately, without having to say,

that something larger had ended.

You left, at a ridiculous hour of the night,

a time normally reserved for old blues songs,

and weeks later, I did too, filling every bag

and suitcase with all the emptiness I could claim.

Even now, I wonder why we chose that place,

whether in hope or desperation; even now,

I wonder in what other rooms,

what other lives, we might have survived.

FOOSBALL

 

Sometime during the night -- tall, silent trees still

breathing the lingering heat of daylight --

my older brother and his high school friend released

the unattended foosball table from the confines

of the White Bear Lake Yacht Club, where Scott and Zelda

once whiled away their early days, their smart

summer whites billowing like sails against the blue,

like all those blank pages waiting patiently to be filled.

But my brother, in his cut-off jeans and rust-colored

tank top, would not have been thinking of this;

nor would he have considered the first quick sketches

of this game on a matchbox in some British pub,

nor the poet who perfected it so that the children of

the Spanish Civil War could still know laughter and play.

He would have been walking calmly, deliberately,

laughing, I suspect, under his breath with his buddy,

up the four long blocks to our falling-down house

with its equally falling-down porch and garage,

his dying car on makeshift blocks beside it.

He might have reminded himself, as he often did

to me, not to run or look afraid. To be cool.

The next day he polished it the way he polished

that car, a kind of blessing, and we played

outside on our uneven patch of lawn, islands

of dry dirt on either side, bright sun shining down

upon us, and our newly acquired pitch of green;

and for one brief moment, the day, the neighborhood,

if not the world itself, belonged to us alone,

as we spun those black handles into a steady blur,

breaking our own rule, showing off, just to see

who could hit the hardest into that narrow goalpost,

its white plastic ball echoing, even now.