248 Family poems

My brother’s worth about two cents, As far as I can see. I simply cannot understand Why they would want a “he.” He spends a good part of his day Asleep inside the crib, And when he eats, he has to wear A stupid baby bib. He cannot walk and cannot talk And cannot throw a ball. In fact, he can’t do anything— He’s just no fun at all. It would have been more sensible, As far as I can see, Instead of getting one like him To get one just like me.

It was bruise marks of hands that alluded to tracks of murder. Her neck was twisted too many times in short rope, and the tree too high for a small woman. “He was here.” He says, “He came to her new Man, too, and said that he was coming for him next.” The nightmare is black tongue. No footprints. The form in the room laughs, “Ha Ha, Goody!” He sees that it is vapor. Later, when he cuts her down, he knows that she came to him, to him, she laughed. The night will not make her unhappy. He had no time to hunt, since he had to bury three more brothers the next day. Car wreck on ice. The insidious soul danced across the river to entice other women to death. If he is man, he is subject to will. If one prefers Archangels, he can be cast into oblivion. That does not comfort the people and we must battle with Bell and Prayer, for the brother. This will take up the nights and the rest of our thoughts. The brother has seen the foreshadowing of events. He will bring the damned down in his fisherman’s grip into the mad boil of the river’s strength.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. O God, he said.O God. He wants to kill me, Mom.

My baby brother has a bear that travels with him everywhere. He never lets the bear from sight. He hugs it in his crib at night. And when my brother’s diaper smells, the name of the bear is what he yells— which is a clever thing to do because my brother named it Pooh.

As a boy he played alone in the fields behind our block, six frame houses holding six immigrant families, the parents speaking only gibberish to their neighbors. Without the kids they couldn't say "Good morning" and be understood. Little wonder he learned early to speak to himself, to tell no one what truly mattered. How much can matter to a kid of seven? Everything. The whole world can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses of August and pretends he's grown up, someone complete in himself without the need for anyone, a warrior from the ancient places our fathers fled years before, those magic places: Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea, Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon, the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston. In the damp grass he recites the names over and over in a hushed voice while the sun climbs into the locust tree to waken the houses. The husbands leave for work, the women return to bed, the kids bend to porridge and milk. He advances slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god, while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

My cousin, Milton, worked for a cable company. The boy I knew when we were children had fists that were often clenched, his face set like an old man whose life had been so hard, it hardened him. But the man's hands opened to let more of the world in. He sent the funniest cards to family and friends at Christmas, laid down cable so others could connect. Yet, he lived alone, kept to himself much of the time, so when his sister found his body, he'd been gone a good while. He died young at fifty-seven, without fuss or bother. No sitting by the bedside or feeding him soup. He just laid himself down like a trunk line and let the signal pass through.

When I sat for a moment in the bleachers of the lower-school gym to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’s kindergarten climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit, I remembered my sweet exasperated mother and those shifting faces of injury that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices, playgrounds of monkey bars and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily in that garden of trauma behind her eyes. Then Rachel’s turn, the smallest child in class, and up she went, legs twined on the rope, ponytail swinging, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five feet, the pink tendrils of her leotard climbing without effort until she’d cleared the lower rafters. She looked down, then up, hanging in that balance of pride and fear, then glancing toward the bleachers to see if I watched, let go her left hand, unworried by that boy with the waffled skull, stiff and turning blue under the belly of a horse, or the Christmas Eve skater on Cagle’s Lake, her face a black plum against the bottom of the ice.

and piles them on the driveway: femur, rib, jawbone with a few flat teeth attached, dozens of thin arced parts. This one for me—40 today. My birthday sent her to the woods and back. Chloe leans in on her knees, arranges the bones along a concrete seam that leads out to the street. In this next decade, she'll go: head off like today, take into her arms all she's curious about. Her line of bones makes an arrow; sun lights them like a sign. She'll go: undeniable as these bones, baffling as what animal they'd make. She's on all fours. The way I labored: some wild thing. She lays out arms and legs; the bones in line make a spine. My height. On the driveway lies my body —when it held her—inside out. The way she came: like bones. Gleaming, after living in my dark. Gleaming. So I can always find her.

I I am asking something gone return: at least one night, her face a girl’s, just twenty, and to be married in a month, holding the dress’s hem to her lips as places are called. And I, come along too late to know her trembling, parting the curtain— let me hear her now perched on the ladder, recite “But Mama, . . . am I pretty enough . . . ?” II When Emily marries, ladies in hats drown out the proper vows —it’s what the play requires; the everyday over the sacred. Even the set is made of items found in the actors’ garages so we always see back to the bones. Here my grandmother stands at the altar with her fictional George and gossip swells in the pews which are rows of folding chairs. III Among the murmuring departed, in the cemetery, my grandmother takes her place at the empty plot. She’s the newcomer who can’t believe she’s dead if the living roam just on the crest of this hill. My grandmother in white poplin dress and hair ribbon lifts her arms in despair— Emily, untouched by the rain. IV Tomorrow her face will glow on the cover of The Shreveport Times— a gorgeous girl demanding her life. “But oh!” she cries in Emily’s voice, “I can go back there and live all those days over again . . .” V So Emily steps back into childhood though the wiser dead have told her don’t— into her mother’s kitchen, her twelfth birthday, a moment she thought she was happy. She watches now that life: mother speaking gruffly, father late to work. Dead Emily kisses the cheek of the classmate playing her mother— understanding, in that kitchen, they’d all been blind: they never knew those people they said they loved. VI My grandmother maintains her grace to the end. She is the queen of the theater; all of Shreveport melts for her smile. She holds her palms out to feel the heavy drops as the curtains close, though she knows this rain is only the sound of rain.

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house I “I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!” That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. ... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound.... Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather’s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. One afternoon in 1922, I sat on the stone porch, looking through screens as black-grained as drifting coal. Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather’s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; stogie-brown beams; fools’-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, its legs, shellacked saplings. A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn fished with a broom straw in a basin hollowed out of a millstone. Like my Grandfather, the d é cor was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather’s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime. II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn display windows of Rogers Peet’s boys’ store below the State House in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin’s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for “Auction,” and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer— its naked Greek statues draped with purple like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear. IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... A fluff of the west wind puffing my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds:Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,” where my Uncle’s duck blind floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded. Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. As if posed for “the engagement photograph,” he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga was accepting the arm of her “protector,” the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, and coils of hair like rooster tails. The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts being bushwhacked on the veldt— They were almost life-size.... My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. “You are behaving like children,” said my Grandfather, when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters, and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ... I cowered in terror. I wasn’t a child at all— unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero.... Near me was the white measuring-door my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights. In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet. While I sat on the tiles, and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse, Uncle Devereux stood behind me. He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle. He was animated, hierarchical, like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.... My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile.... Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.