248 Family poems

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

I have a yong suster Fer beyonden the se, Many be the drowryes That she sente me. She sente me the cherye Withouten ony ston; And so she dede the dove Withouten ony bon. She sente me the brer Withouten ony rinde; She bad me love my lemman Withoute longing. How shuld ony cherye Be withoute ston? And how shuld ony dove Be withoute bon? How shuld ony brer Been withoute rinde? How shuld I love myn lemman Withoute longing? Whan the cherye was a flowr Than hadde it non ston. When the dove was an ey Than hadde it non bon. When the brer was onbred Than hadde it non rind. Whan the maiden hath that she loveth She is without longing.

I leave her weeping in her barred little bed, her warm hand clutching at my hand, but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight— she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy, with her lovely crumpled face like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away. We have been playing for hours, and now we need to stop, and she does not want to. She is counting on me to lower the boom that is her heavy body, and settle her down. I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips. Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer. Friends dying, I need to call. My daughter may be weeping all my tears, I only know that even this young and lying on her side, her head uplifted like a cupped tulip, sometimes she needs to cry.

Granma cautioned in a kitchen off Century and Hoover: Never throw your hair away. Burn it. Till yellow cornbread bakes and greens release pot liquor, her garnet-polished fingers unraveled each cornrow. Never throw your hair away, burn it till yellow flames flick up and turn orange, blue. Overhead, her garnet-polished fingers unraveled each cornrow, wrestling. I reminisce, standing over her deathbed. Rain picks up and turns ocher, blue. Unsaid were simple things. Oxtail stew and yam recipes I recollect, standing over her deathbed. She smoked Mores leaning in the kitchen doorjamb, when simple things — oxtail stew and yam recipes — were not measured nor written. Cooking while she smoked Mores leaning in the kitchen doorjamb, her left hand in the profound curve of her hip. She’d say, Chile, ma recipes are not measured nor written. Cooking while I sat alongside the stove waiting for the hot comb, meantime her left hand in the profound curve of her hip, she’d say, Chile, I may be dead and gone, but you mark my words. Sometimes I sat alongside the stove waiting for the hot comb, meantime I loved watching her smoking, cooking, talking with More fingers, I may be dead and gone, but you’ll mark my words. This time, she is quiet. I hold maroon-polished hands as her soul lifts, waits, lingers. I loved watching her smoking, cooking, talking with More fingers. Halcyon rain picks up, soaks me blue. Nothing unsaid. She is quiet. I hold maroon-polished hands as her soul lifts, waits, lingers, restful. I’m remembering — standing over her deathbed.

The lousy job my father lands I’m tickled pink to celebrate. My mother’s rosary-pinching hands stack pigs in blankets on a plate. Teeny uncircumcised Buddha penises (cocktail hot dogs in strips of dough): I gobble these puffed-up weenie geniuses as if they’d tell me what I need to know to get the fuck out of here. They don’t only stink of fear. They’re doom and shame and dumb pig fate. I tell my mom I think they’re great. Dad chews his slowly with a pint of gin, and says he eats a whole shit deal because of us. My mom’s in tears again. I don’t know who to hate or how to feel.

Stepping over the stones of my mother, chicken bones, straw, the cellar in which the man was found, that man my grandfather the day the sharecroppers left town, their son shot dead — the thing whiskey’ll do to a man. The woman who waited under the house at night, counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves, walking bare-boned lanes, toes buried beneath blackened leaves — no cause for worry if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row. Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind. I tell you these things so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear, not think I do not know what makes a life, what makes people do the things they do. I know my fears — I’ve named them, counted them out one by one like tarot cards, voodoo dolls: birth, death, poverty, obscurity, that you will leave me, or I will leave you.

It is the hour of lamps. On our knees my mother and I, still young, color with crayons threadbare nap on the living room rug. Though there is no money, no one seems to care. We are self-possessed as bugs waving their antennae through cracks in the kitchen's linoleum floor. When Father begins to read from the red gilt volume in his lap, a circle of light encapsulates us like hearts in a womb. Except their marriage is already dead. I know this though I'm only six. So we visit pharaohs, a boatman on the Nile, Crusaders eating grapes on a beach. Life escapes with all its sadness while two tragic Greek poets inhabit Father's voice. Who'd know I am just a boy when he begins a stoic moral tale concerning a dull provincial doctor's young French wife? If Mother, in French, begins to sing to herself, I know she's had enough. Crayon stubs litter the crumbling rug. Our prostrate cat sneezes at the dust in her fur. And cries from a swallow remind us one swallow doesn't make a summer.

Fortune has brought me down—her wonted way— from station great and high to low estate; Fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth honor alone is left. Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did fortune make me laugh with what she gave! But for these girls, the kata’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard— Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length. Nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they, walking on the ground? If but the breeze blow harsh on one of them my eye says no to slumber all night long.

Stop belonging to me so much, face-head. Leave me to my child and my flowers. I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that. It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead and no talent for creatures. No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s. Don’t you have a place to go, face-head? Deep into the brick basement of another life? To kill some time, I mean. That furnace light could take a shine to you. There are always places, none of them mine. And always time—rainbow sugar show of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky— but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply. “Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it. All those prodigal particles, flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment of glitches. The chorus just more us. But nowhere bare and slippery have I got a prayer. If I had two hands to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.

For Cynthia When he would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you “Daddy”—he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.” He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles. —AFTER THE MIDDLE-IRISH ROMANCE, THE MADNESS OF SUIBHNE 1 Child of my winter, born When the new fallen soldiers froze In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows, When I was torn By love I could not still, By fear that silenced my cramped mind To that cold war where, lost, I could not find My peace in my will, All those days we could keep Your mind a landscape of new snow Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below, His fields asleep In their smooth covering, white As quilts to warm the resting bed Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread For me to write, And thinks: Here lies my land Unmarked by agony, the lean foot Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper’s boot; And I have planned My chances to restrain The torments of demented summer or Increase the deepening harvest here before It snows again. 2 Late April and you are three; today We dug your garden in the yard. To curb the damage of your play, Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling, Four slender sticks of lath stand guard Uplifting their thin string. So you were the first to tramp it down. And after the earth was sifted close You brought your watering can to drown All earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed With light loam in their steadfast rows. Child, we’ve done our best. Someone will have to weed and spread The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour When shadow falls across their bed. You should try to look at them every day Because when they come to full flower I will be away. 3 The child between them on the street Comes to a puddle, lifts his feet And hangs on their hands. They start At the live weight and lurch together, Recoil to swing him through the weather, Stiffen and pull apart. We read of cold war soldiers that Never gained ground, gave none, but sat Tight in their chill trenches. Pain seeps up from some cavity Through the ranked teeth in sympathy; The whole jaw grinds and clenches Till something somewhere has to give. It’s better the poor soldiers live In someone else’s hands Than drop where helpless powers fall On crops and barns, on towns where all Will burn. And no man stands. For good, they sever and divide Their won and lost land. On each side Prisoners are returned Excepting a few unknown names. The peasant plods back and reclaims His fields that strangers burned And nobody seems very pleased. It’s best. Still, what must not be seized Clenches the empty fist. I tugged your hand, once, when I hated Things less: a mere game dislocated The radius of your wrist. Love’s wishbone, child, although I’ve gone As men must and let you be drawn Off to appease another, It may help that a Chinese play Or Solomon himself might say I am your real mother. 4 No one can tell you why the season will not wait; the night I told you I must leave, you wept a fearful rate to stay up late. Now that it’s turning Fall, we go to take our walk among municipal flowers, to steal one off its stalk, to try and talk. We huff like windy giants scattering with our breath gray-headed dandelions; Spring is the cold wind's aftermath. The poet saith. But the asters, too, are gray, ghost-gray. Last night’s cold is sending on their way petunias and dwarf marigold, hunched sick and old. Like nerves caught in a graph, the morning-glory vines frost has erased by half still scrawl across their rigid twines. Like broken lines of verses I can’t make. In its unraveling loom we find a flower to take, with some late buds that might still bloom, back to your room. Night comes and the stiff dew. I’m told a friend’s child cried because a cricket, who had minstreled every night outside her window, died. 5 Winter again and it is snowing; Although you are still three, You are already growing Strange to me. You chatter about new playmates, sing Strange songs; you do not know Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding Or where I go Or when I sang for bedtime,Fox Went out on a chilly night, Before I went for walks And did not write; You never mind the squalls and storms That are renewed long since; Outside the thick snow swarms Into my prints And swirls out by warehouses, sealed, Dark cowbarns, huddled, still, Beyond to the blank field, The fox’s hill Where he backtracks and sees the paw, Gnawed off, he cannot feel; Conceded to the jaw Of toothed, blue steel. 6 Easter has come around again; the river is rising over the thawed ground and the banksides. When you come you bring an egg dyed lavender. We shout along our bank to hear our voices returning from the hills to meet us. We need the landscape to repeat us. You lived on this bank first. While nine months filled your term, we knew how your lungs, immersed in the womb, miraculously grew their useless folds till the fierce, cold air rushed in to fill them out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour, caught breath, and cried with your full lung power. Over the stagnant bight we see the hungry bank swallow flaunting his free flight still; we sink in mud to follow the killdeer from the grass that hides her nest. That March there was rain; the rivers rose; you could hear killdeers flying all night over the mudflats crying. You bring back how the red- winged blackbird shrieked, slapping frail wings, diving at my head— I saw where her tough nest, cradled, swings in tall reeds that must sway with the winds blowing every way. If you recall much, you recall this place. You still live nearby—on the opposite hill. After the sharp windstorm of July Fourth, all that summer through the gentle, warm afternoons, we heard great chain saws chirr like iron locusts. Crews of roughneck boys swarmed to cut loose branches wrenched in the shattering wind, to hack free all the torn limbs that could sap the tree. In the debris lay starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun we surprised one day a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon. In my hands she flapped so fearfully that I let her go. Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net. You bring things I’d as soon forget. You raise into my head a Fall night that I came once more to sit on your bed; sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore- head and you wheezed for breath, for help, like some child caught beneath its comfortable woolly blankets, drowning there. Your lungs caught and would not take the air. Of all things, only we have power to choose that we should die; nothing else is free in this world to refuse it. Yet I, who say this, could not raise myself from bed how many days to the thieving world. Child, I have another wife, another child. We try to choose our life. 7 Here in the scuffled dust is our ground of play. I lift you on your swing and must shove you away, see you return again, drive you off again, then stand quiet till you come. You, though you climb higher, farther from me, longer, will fall back to me stronger. Bad penny, pendulum, you keep my constant time to bob in blue July where fat goldfinches fly over the glittering, fecund reach of our growing lands. Once more now, this second, I hold you in my hands. 8 I thumped on you the best I could which was no use; you would not tolerate your food until the sweet, fresh milk was soured with lemon juice. That puffed you up like a fine yeast. The first June in your yard like some squat Nero at a feast you sat and chewed on white, sweet clover. That is over. When you were old enough to walk we went to feed the rabbits in the park milkweed; saw the paired monkeys, under lock, consume each other's salt. Going home we watched the slow stars follow us down Heaven’s vault. You said, let’s catch one that comes low, pull off its skin and cook it for our dinner. As absentee bread-winner, I seldom got you such cuisine; we ate in local restaurants or bought what lunches we could pack in a brown sack with stale, dry bread to toss for ducks on the green-scummed lagoons, crackers for porcupine and fox, life-savers for the footpad coons to scour and rinse, snatch after in their muddy pail and stare into their paws. When I moved next door to the jail I learned to fry omelettes and griddlecakes so I could set you supper at my table. As I built back from helplessness, when I grew able, the only possible answer was you had to come here less. This Hallowe’en you come one week. You masquerade as a vermilion, sleek, fat, crosseyed fox in the parade or, where grim jackolanterns leer, go with your bag from door to door foraging for treats. How queer: when you take off your mask my neighbors must forget and ask whose child you are. Of course you lose your appetite, whine and won’t touch your plate; as local law I set your place on an orange crate in your own room for days. At night you lie asleep there on the bed and grate your jaw. Assuredly your father’s crimes are visited on you. You visit me sometimes. The time’s up. Now our pumpkin sees me bringing your suitcase. He holds his grin; the forehead shrivels, sinking in. You break this year’s first crust of snow off the runningboard to eat. We manage, though for days I crave sweets when you leave and know they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet foods leave us cavities. 9 I get numb and go in though the dry ground will not hold the few dry swirls of snow and it must not be very cold. A friend asks how you’ve been and I don’t know or see much right to ask. Or what use it could be to know. In three months since you came the leaves have fallen and the snow; your pictures pinned above my desk seem much the same. Somehow I come to find myself upstairs in the third floor museum’s halls, walking to kill my time once more among the enduring and resigned stuffed animals, where, through a century’s caprice, displacement and known treachery between its wars, they hear some old command and in their peaceable kingdoms freeze to this still scene, Nature Morte. Here by the door, its guardian, the patchwork dodo stands where you and your stepsister ran laughing and pointing. Here, last year, you pulled my hands and had your first, worst quarrel, so toys were put up on your shelves. Here in the first glass cage the little bobcats arch themselves, still practicing their snarl of constant rage. The bison, here, immense, shoves at his calf, brow to brow, and looks it in the eye to see what is it thinking now. I forced you to obedience; I don’t know why. Still the lean lioness beyond them, on her jutting ledge of shale and desert shrub, stands watching always at the edge, stands hard and tanned and envious above her cub; with horns locked in tall heather, two great Olympian Elk stand bound, fixed in their lasting hate till hunger brings them both to ground. Whom equal weakness binds together none shall separate. Yet separate in the ocean of broken ice, the white bear reels beyond the leathery groups of scattered, drab Arctic seals arrested here in violent motion like Napoleon’s troops. Our states have stood so long at war, shaken with hate and dread, they are paralyzed at bay; once we were out of reach, we said, we would grow reasonable and strong. Some other day. Like the cold men of Rome, we have won costly fields to sow in salt, our only seed. Nothing but injury will grow. I write you only the bitter poems that you can’t read. Onan who would not breed a child to take his brother’s bread and be his brother’s birth, rose up and left his lawful bed, went out and spilled his seed in the cold earth. I stand by the unborn, by putty-colored children curled in jars of alcohol, that waken to no other world, unchanging, where no eye shall mourn. I see the caul that wrapped a kitten, dead. I see the branching, doubled throat of a two-headed foal; I see the hydrocephalic goat; here is the curled and swollen head, there, the burst skull; skin of a limbless calf; a horse’s foetus, mummified; mounted and joined forever, the Siamese twin dogs that ride belly to belly, half and half, that none shall sever. I walk among the growths, by gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts, by fistulas and cancers, where the malignancy man loathes is held suspended and persists. And I don’t know the answers. The window’s turning white. The world moves like a diseased heart packed with ice and snow. Three months now we have been apart less than a mile. I cannot fight or let you go. 10 The vicious winter finally yields the green winter wheat; the farmer, tired in the tired fields he dare not leave, will eat. Once more the runs come fresh; prevailing piglets, stout as jugs, harry their old sow to the railing to ease her swollen dugs and game colts trail the herded mares that circle the pasture courses; our seasons bring us back once more like merry-go-round horses. With crocus mouths, perennial hungers, into the park Spring comes; we roast hot dogs on old coat hangers and feed the swan bread crumbs, pay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits, and leathery Canada goose who took, last Fall, our tame white habits and now will not turn loose. In full regalia, the pheasant cocks march past their dubious hens; the porcupine and the lean, red fox trot around bachelor pens and the miniature painted train wails on its oval track: you said, I’m going to Pennsylvania! and waved. And you’ve come back. If I loved you, they said I’d leave and find my own affairs. Well, once again this April, we’ve come around to the bears; punished and cared for, behind bars, the coons on bread and water stretch thin black fingers after ours. And you are still my daughter.