248 Family poems

My parents kept me from children who were rough Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams. I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys Who copied my lisp behind me on the road. They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud While I looked the other way, pretending to smile. I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

Serum of steam rising from the cup, what comfort to be known personally by Barbara, her perfect pouring hand and starched ascot, known as the two easy eggs and the single pancake, without saying. What pleasure for an immigrant— anything without saying. My uncle slid into his booth. I cannot tell you—how I love this place. He drained the water glass, noisily clinking his ice. My uncle hailed from an iceless region. He had definite ideas about water drinking. I cannot tell you—all the time. But then he’d try. My uncle wore a white shirt every day of his life. He raised his hand against the roaring ocean and the television full of lies. He shook his head back and forth from one country to the other and his ticket grew longer. Immigrants had double and nothing all at once. Immigrants drove the taxis, sold the beer and Cokes. When he found one note that rang true, he sang it over and over inside. Coffee, honey. His eyes roamed the couples at other booths, their loose banter and casual clothes. But he never became them. Uncle who finally left in a bravado moment after 23 years,to live in the old country forever, to stay and never come back,

I am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airs Wrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums. Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white, Those holy Joes. And the fish, the fish— Christ! they are panes of ice, A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinking Its first communion out of my live toes. The candle Gulps and recovers its small altitude, Its yellows hearten. O love, how did you get here? O embryo Remembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms clean In you, ruby. The pain You wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs— The last of Victoriana. Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

a tiny blue metal race car grandma gave to me when I was 32.  There’s an obelisk now in Skeleton Canyon. Maybe you’re too close to the speaker. Tell the Arthur Lee of Love confrontation story. The tender does not approve of our vulgarity. Double vocal for airports, weekends and holidays. Numb grids that represent human inaction. An incidental arrival? Why that landing? The speaker of the poem seems baffled to be in his/her time continuum. Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, playing together on the street corner. Turn down the harp and make it feel more distant. The next few minutes could hardly be identified as words. A few fireman later, the benefit of a lifelong love was clear. A locus Of abnormal sensation. Harder to keep an indiscriminate man from slaughter. Off state extemporaneous crushed weight. Consulting the at-bats for ideas of speed. I will be home when my shirt is too dirty to wear.

It was a misunderstanding. I got into bed, made love with the woman I found there, called her honey, mowed the lawn, had three children, painted the house twice, fixed the furnace, overcame an addiction to blue pills, read Spinoza every night without once meeting his God, buried one child, ate my share of Jell-o and meatloaf, went away for nine hours a day and came home hoarding my silence, built a ferris wheel in my mind, bolt by bolt, then it broke just as it spun me to the top. Turns out I live next door.

Not having spoken for years now, I know you claim exile from my consciousness. Yet I wear mourning whole nights through for that embrace that warmed my ignorant lust even past intimacies you had dreamed. I played your daughter-husband, lover-son, to earn both Abraham and Ishmael's guilt for your indulgence, and in time, reproach. Who sent us to that wilderness we both now know, although I blamed you for that house of women too many years. But Time is a waiting woman, not some old man with a stupid beard, and when I finally met my father I found him arrogant and dull, a formican liar with an Austrian accent. Well, we meet the phantom that we long for in the end, and getting there is half the grief. Meanwhile, my theories rearrange themselves like sand before this woman whose flaccid breasts sway with her stumblings, whose diamonds still thaw pity from my eyes. You're older than I thought. But so am I, and grateful that we've come to this: a ragged truce, an affirmation in me tht your strength, your pushiness, your sharp love, your embroidery of lies—all, all were survival tools, as when, during our personal diaspora, you stood in some far country blocks away, burning poems I no longer sent you like Yahrzeit candles in my name, unsure of me at last who sought a birthright elsewhere, beyond the oasis of your curse, even beyond that last mirage, your blessing. Mother, in ways neither of us can ever understand, I have come home.

As I leave for work she holds out her arms, and I bend to lift her . . . always heavier than I remember, because in my mind she is still that seedling bough I used to cradle in one elbow. Her hug is honest, fierce, forgiving. I think of Oregon's coastal pines, wind-bent even on quiet days; they've grown in ways the Pacific breeze has blown them all their lives. And how will my daughter grow? Last night, I dreamed of a mid-ocean gale, a howl among writhing waterspouts; I don't know what it meant, or if it's still distant, or already here. I know only how I hug my daughter, my arms grown taut with the thought of that wind.

Against the backdark, bright riband flickers of heat lightning.    Nearer hills begin to show, to come clear as a hard, detached and glimmering brim against light lifting there.    And here, pitched over the braided arroyo choked with debris, a tent, its wan, cakey, road-rur color.    On the front stake, two green dragonflies, riding each other, pause, Look! cries the boy, running, the father behind him running too— and the canyon opening out in front of them its magisterial consequence, cramming vertiginous air down its throat— to snatch him from the scarp.

My grandmothers were strong. They followed plows and bent to toil. They moved through fields sowing seed. They touched earth and grain grew. They were full of sturdiness and singing. My grandmothers were strong. My grandmothers are full of memories Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay With veins rolling roughly over quick hands They have many clean words to say. My grandmothers were strong. Why am I not as they?

There are charms that forestall harm. The house bristles with opportunities for stasis: refolding the linens along their creases, keeping the spoons and chairs in their right places. Nobody needs to witness one’s exquisite care with the napkins for the napkins to have been the act that made the fact unhappen.