Denise Low

Walking home I feel a presence following and realize he is always there that Native man with coal-black-hair who is my grandfather. In my first memories he is present, mostly wordless, resident in the house where I was born. My mother shows him the cleft in my chin identical to his. I am swaddled and blinking in the kitchen light. So we are introduced. We never part. Sometimes I forget he lodges in my house still the bone-house where my heart beats. I carry his mother’s framework a sturdy structure. I learn his birthright. I hear his mother’s teachings through what my mother said of her: She kept a pot of stew on the stove all day for anyone to eat. She never went to church but said you could be a good person anyway. She fed hoboes during the ‘30s, her back porch a regular stop-over. Every person has rights no matter what color. Be respectful. This son of hers, my grandfather, still walks the streets with me. Some twist of blood and heat still spark across the time bridge. Here, listen: Air draws through these lungs made from his. His blood still pulses through this hand.

I look through glass and see a young woman of twenty, washing dishes, and the window turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago. She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot I still own. I see her outline against lamplight; she knows only her side of the pane. The porch where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear water run in the sink as she lowers her head, blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist. I step forward for a better look and she dissolves into lumber and paint. A gate I passed through to the next life loses shape. Once more I stand squared into the present, among maple trees and scissor-tailed birds, in a garden, almost a mother to that faint, distant woman.

Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks, until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes, and warbles a boy’s tenor, wood-flute tones, pure séance hymns from before Christians. Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare as seawater washes through the room, seeping through floorboards to serpent dens. The chorus stirs spirits from family lore. Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee— all rise from steerage and sing with the lords. Next performance is a poet reciting, “The Luck of the Irish,” blue eyes snapping: “Once I journeyed to the Cliffs of Moher.” I follow him to a rocky precipice, pause, then jump to dizzy foam tides below, fall, keep falling into this slow, heartbreaking solo.

By the river years ago, recursive in memory, a finite moment, the past ended. Future began. The river flowed south. You were a man’s face floating among stones. By a river in autumn, willow leaves were yellow whisks in updrafts. We were not alone. Cottonwood boles twisted against banks, turtles dozed in the roots, bark slivered into water. The river sounded the swish of its name. You waded the Neosho as it meandered east. Two sandhill cranes fly overhead. Their legs stretch straight behind as they swim through air. Their grace is the river’s. No one saw flood-seined silt, gravel, broken mussel pearls. I stayed, you left. By the river I met you each day. I meet you each day. I will be meeting you in invariant futures. By the river leaves turn. Mud cracks pentagonal shapes. You return and leave. The river remains. By the river I was a child, I am grown. I remember water pooled, not moving.