248 Family poems

This is all I am to her now: a pair of legs in running shoes, two arms strung with braided wire. She heaves a carton sagging with CDs at me and I accept it gladly, lifting with my legs, not bending over, raising each foot high enough to clear the step. Fortunate to be of any use to her at all, I wrestle, stooped and single-handed, with her mattress in the stairwell, saying nothing as it pins me, sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner, spiny cactus, five-pound sacks of rice and lentils slumped against my heart: up one flight of stairs and then another, down again with nothing in my arms.

If I am in the house beams posts planks siding slate protect us Wall guard us against the night-terrors Floor shore us up above the void below cover us roof enclose us from the void above door keep out the angry stranger Hearth cherish the fire windows be beacons breathe out my warm air chimney while I am in the house In this room my eyes be twelve-paned windows clock pump my blood cover my nakedness, rug curtains be eyelids sofa, I rest on your strong thighs Where is the soul’s seat? Doctors have cut up frogs and not found love. Is this my reason? I in myself

When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands. As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines. During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks. I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks. Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother." She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.

known for her cooking the consistent perfection of spring rolls evenly fried her secret to brush it with just a hint of apple juice to add some color give some flavor she is the mother of five a wife a widow it is easy to forget her strength in its subtlety she keeps it hidden like the smell of apple juice that reminds me of my family the eighteen days we spent on a tanker the sticky metal floors streaked with the vomit of children crying a pearl a day she removed from a string milky white marbles on an army issued blanket a make-shift playground that kept what was ours i would have to be good no crying no complaining it was mine to keep it was mine to lose being thirsty that i remember drinking juice from a can tomato apple a concoction of both my mother traded her red jade bracelet for a jar of water the kind you drank if you had money to buy if you spoke korean the kind that was plain without the taste of salt she said uống từ từ—drink it slowly i was given a third of this precious water the rest she saved     hid in a suitcase

His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low voice; all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine. When he went to high school Webber was in his class. Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in lawns with trees beside the gutters. The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall. At twelve o’clock the boys ran out of school to a lunchroom around the corner. First come, first served, and they ran as fast as they could. Webber would run up beside him and knock him against the wall. He tried not to mind and thought Webber would tire of it. One day he hit Webber’s side; his fist fell off Webber’s over- coat. Webber turned with a glad shout and punched him as he cowered. His home was in a neighborhood of workingmen where there were few Jews. When he came home from school he walked as quickly as he could, his head bowed and cap pulled low over his face. Once, a few blocks from home, a tall lad stopped him. “Are you a Jew? I knock the block off every Jew I meet.” “No,” he answered. “I think you’re a Jew. What’s your name?” He told him, glad that his name was not markedly Jewish and yet foreign enough to answer for his looks. “Where do you live?” He told him and added, “Come around any old time and ask about me.” So he got away. When he was through high school he worked in the civil service as a typist, taken on until a rush of business was over. He took the test for a steady job, but his standing on the list was low, unlikely to be reached for a long time, if ever before the new list. Looking for work, he always came upon a group waiting for the job. He was short and weak-looking, and looked peevish. He could not get work for months. At last an old German storekeeper wanted to hire him and asked at what he had been working. He told him. “It doesn’t pay me to break you in, if you are going to leave me. Have you taken another civil service test? Are you waiting for a new appointment?” “No,” he answered. In a few months a letter came to his home from the civil service board, asking him to report for work as a typist, a permanent appointment. There was no hurry, but his father did not know and so brought the letter to the store. There had been a boy in his class at school whose name was Kore. Kore was short, too, but he had the chest of an old sailor and thick, bandy legs. He shouted when he spoke and was always laughing. Kore moved into the block. With Kore he was not afraid to stand on the stoop after work or go walking anywhere. Once they went to Coney Island and Kore wanted to go bathing. It was late at night and no one else was in. They went along the beach until they came to the iron pier the steamboats dock at. Kore boasted that he would swim around the pier and slid away into the black water. At last the people were gone. The booths were long darkened. He waited for Kore at the other side of the pier, watching the empty waves come in.

Ours was a play-filled childhood; irrigation ditches ran deep during the summers. We played in the water and dirt, then inscribed ABCs and numbers onto the smooth ground. Our cat Polly died of rabies; then all the pets had to be shot, some in the rib cage as they thrashed in panic. There was a pink bruise on my forehead from pressing against the wall. We couldn't figure out how such a thing could happen. The dogs were steadfast figures around the farm. They chased strange cars and sometimes invoked deep panic among visitors and passersby. They had cuts and bruises from scuffles with roaming packs. No tags were inscribed with their random Navajo names. Snazzy was skinny; his rib cage obvious through thin fur. He looked as if he might die from hunger, but he ate like nobody's business. Who knew he would die of rabies with the rest? The main thing was to figure out how they contracted it, my parents said. We cried until our rib cages ached; our eyes stayed swollen. This first loss was too deep to even talk about. Decades later, I can finally describe how that summer led us into a grief that felt like a bruise that would last forever. But our neighbor suffered worse bruises: their huge dog, named Dog, was the first to die and was the cause of all this. Their home and fields are inscribed in our memories as "the rabies place." Over time, they must have figured it was too much to live down. Childhood losses run deep, even though we are grandparents now. The memory is an invisible cage of anguished sobs, gunshots, yelping howls, canine rib cages exploding. Sometimes we reminisce and notice that the bruises of grief have turned pale like smoothed-over scars. That initial deep hurt was the start, we found, of how love could die right before us, even as we watched: stunned figures pleading for mercy, urgent prayers saying, "Let God's scribe mark this down. We've paid our dues. Our hearts are inscribed with loss after loss." For some reason, after everything, our rib cages held up and continued to cradle tender hearts. They must have figured that all the prayers and careful teachings would prevent bruises that would weaken us. Our love for those homely animals was deep and would figure in the knowledge that such bruises aren't endless, and that our rib cages are not mere bones. One can die from grief, so now we can describe loss and love as the Holy Twins.

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare Of electric lights and a strange arranged Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council. I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters On stage suddenly wanting to say,I am. I was almost all eye: they weighed me down, Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face Which did not yet know struggle, burden; How the look of newborns unnerves. Then They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun Still too small to throw up into the sky. It was midnight when they injected me With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth Saying,these. Now it was contracted to a drop: And in the morning I knew both death and life. Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us. Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say,My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

Getting the child to bed is awful work, Committing that rage to sleep that will not sleep. The lie rots in my throat saying, “O.K. There is balm in Gilead. Go to bed. Honey of generation has betrayed us both.” And truly it is no wild surmise of darkness Nor Pisgah purview of Canaan drowned in blood But only my child saying its say in bed. If madness ever covers me, the caul contract That now but loosely insinuates a shroud I shall go howling into the conscious grave (God keep children from the power of the dog) Follow that note into the uttering horn Awake in the womb from which I was born.

Now She knows what it feels like