248 Family poems

My mother groand! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud; Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swaddling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mothers breast.

A rectangular Bulova, my Zadie called a dress watch, I wore it for years, and though it gave the wrong time I treasured the sense of community it offered, the beauty of certain numerals — the seven especially, the way it leaned into its subtle work and never changed, and signified exactly what it was and no more. In dreams I learned that only the watch and the circle of ash trees surrounding me, and the grass prodding my bare feet, and of course my nakedness were necessary, though common. Just surrendering my youth, I still believed everything in dreams meant something I could parse to discover who we were. As I write these words in sepia across a lined page I have no idea why they’ve taken the shape I’ve given them, some cursive, some not, some elegantly articulated, others plain, many of no use at all. They go on working as best they can, like the Parker 51 that spent its coming of age stumbling backwards into Yiddish or the Bulova that finally threw up its twin baroque arms in surrender to the infinite and quit without a word. The Parker still works and is never to blame. On good days it works better than I, and when it leaks it leaks only ink, never a word best left unsaid. As a boy I would steal into Zadie’s bedroom, find the watch in a velvet box, wind it, hold it to each ear — back then both worked — to hear its music, the jeweled wheels and axles that kept time alive. There is still such joy in these tokens from back of beyond: the watch, the Parker pen, the tiny pocket knife he used to separate truth from lies, the ivory cigarette holder — a gift, he claimed, from FDR who mistook him for a famous Russian violinist. I could call them “Infinite riches in a little room” or go cosmic and regard them as fragments of a great mystery instead of what they are, amulets against nothing.

In Canada, on a dark afternoon, from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory I saw your two clenched fists in a tree— your most recent rage—until I came to my senses, and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected through a window onto the maple leaves. Was it simply that I had stolen away in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday, twelve years after your death, and you less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box? It is late August in the moral North. To answer your first question, I obey the fish and game laws of New York State, Ontario and Quebec. The odd branch has already turned red. As for me I have turned inside out, I cry for revolution against myself— no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray, you, less than a thumb print on a page. Matters still outstanding: you will not remember— a boy, I cut school, sneaked out to the 42nd Street library to read among readers like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride. I have kept your Greek grammar, your 78 revolutions per minute recording of Rossini’s Barber you played to stop me from crying, almost my first memory. Your “valuable papers,” now valuable only to me, I fed to a fire years ago. Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead every day, and carrying you on my back, out of the burning city, in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud. Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain where God in his divine humor tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son, and she asks laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?” Take one foot, then the other … Imitate a departure if you make it not, and each going will lend a kind of easiness to the next. Father, you poisoned my father. I am standing alone, telling the truth as you commanded. (Without too many of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.) You, less than a seed of a wild grape. Today, in the last moments of light I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water. As I sing my song of how you will be remembered, if I could out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast and stuff your ears with wax. I regret some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father, do not forget your 18 inch Board of Education ruler on which I measured my penis, marking its progress. You kept it on your desk before you till your old age. One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile I wore on my face through boyhood. I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.

Consider the adhesiveness of things to the ghosts that prized them, the "olden days" of birthday spoons and silver napkin rings. Too carelessly I opened that velvet drawer of heirlooms. There lay my grandmother's soul begging under veils of tarnish to be brought back whole. She who was always a climate in herself, who refused to vanish as the nineteen-hundreds grew older and louder, and the wars worse, and her grandchildren, bigger and ruder in her daughter's house. How completely turned around her lavender world became, how upside down. And how much, under her "flyaway" hair, she must have suffered, sitting there ignored by the dinner guests hour after candlelit hour, rubbed out, like her initials on the silverware, eating little, passing bread, until the wine's flood, the smoke's blast, the thunderous guffaws at last roared her to bed. In her tiny garden of confidence, wasted she felt, and furious. She fled to church, but Baby Jesus had grown out of his manger. She read of Jews in the New Haven Register gassed or buried alive. Every night, at the wheel of an ambulance, she drove and drove, not knowing how to drive. She died in '55, paralyzed, helpless. Her no man's land survived. I light my own age with a spill from her distress. And there it is, her dream, my heirloom, my drive downhill at the wheel of the last bus, the siren's wail, the smoke, the sickly smell. The drawer won't shut again. It never will.

Never mind what you think. The old man did not rush Recklessly into the coop the last minute. The chickens hardly stirred For the easy way he sang to them. Red sun is burning out Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man Touches the blade of his killing knife With his fat thumb. I’m in the backyard on a quilt Spread out under the heavy dark plums He cooks for his whiskey. He walks among the hens singing His chicken song way down in his throat Until he finds the one who’s ready And he holds her to his barrel chest. What did you think? Did you think you just jerk the bird From her roost and hack her head off? Beyond the coop I see the fleeting white dress of my grandmother As she crosses and recrosses the porch To fill the bucket with scalding water. How easy the feathers will come When she drowns them for plucking And clouds the air with a stench I can’t stand not to breathe. I’m not even a boy yet but I watch The old man sing out into the yard, His knife already at the chicken’s throat When everything begins to spin in my world— He slices off the head without a squawk, And swirls the bird in circles, a fine Blood spray fanning out far enough To reach me where I wait Obediently, where I can’t stop watching The head the old man picks up, His free hand becomes a puppet chicken Clucking at me, pecking my head with the cold beak Until I cry for him to stop, Until he pins me down, clucking, laughing, blood All over his hands. He did it so I would remember him I tell myself all these years later. He did it because it was his last summer Among us. In August he didn’t feel the fly Come into his cancerous ear and lay its eggs. He didn’t feel the maggots hatch As he sat dazed with pills in the sun. He pecked my head and laughed out of love, Out of love he snatched me roughly to his chest And sang his foreign songs way, Way down in his throat.

1 Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand- fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style, they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee. I have at one time or another been in love with my mother, 1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum), and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece (she sends me letters written in large block print, and her picture is the only one that smiles at me). I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.” 2 Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr / like a salmon quitting the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birthstream / I hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my packet and a monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks. I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard / I smelled the old land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men / I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost contented / I had almost caught up with me. (The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker’s crib for a fix.) This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them, they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children to float in the space between.

I will hear his sleep in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become as pliant and full as snowfall, its singing silence as profound My ears and his throat — the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us My own sleep will be his clock, safely keeping time, his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour, heavy and warm, into a blanket of air and sound

were some quite creepy men — one used to lie down on the dayroom floor, then get us all to pile on top of him — and a basilisk- eyed matron in a blue uniform with a watch dangling beneath her right collarbone.Thump thump thump went her footsteps, making the asbestos ceiling tiles quiver, and me want to hide, or run like a rabbit in a fire . . . What we lost, we lost forever. A minor devil played at chess with us, forcing the pieces to levitate and hover, flourishing swords, in midair. I’d grasp them now, the orotund bishop, the stealthy knight, the all- knowing queen, but they dissolve in my fingers, refuse to return to the board, to their squares.

All things fall away: store fronts on the west, ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers. The diminishing neighborhood sprawls under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm, the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted. Inside the cottage a bay window translates the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled as the house turns slowly beneath the drift of tree branch and sun. We have come to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets over the fat reading chair and the piano’s mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s blur of black notes. Among a turmoil of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom we imagine a flourish of light, her husband loosening the sash of her white silk robe, his beard brushing the back of her neck. Amores, the art of love, of words lifting like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost risen to music. We lock the heavy door and walk away from the silence, the lone hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house.

It’s right before you drive away: our limbs still warm with sleep, coffee sputtering out, the north wind, your hips pressing me hard against the table. I like it hard because I need to remember this. I want to say harder. How we must look to the road that’s gone, to the splayed morning of cold butter and inveterate greed. Light comes and goes in the field. Oranges in a bowl, garlic, radio. In the story of us, no one wins. Isolation is a new theme someone says. By now I’ve invented you. Most people don’t like to touch dead things. That’s what my friend tells me when I find my fish on the floor. It must have wanted an out. Sometimes my desire scares me. Sometimes I watch football and think: four chances is enough to get there. But we don’t have helmets. I want to say harder, I can take it, but there’s no proof I can.