248 Family poems

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer field her team, the Gladiators, is losing ten to zip. She never loses interest in the roughhouse one-on-one that comes every half a minute. She sticks her leg in danger and comes out the other side running. Later a clump of opponents on the street is chant- ing, WE WON, WE WON, WE . . . She stands up on the convertible seat holding to the wind- shield. WE LOST, WE LOST BIGTIME, TEN TO NOTHING, WE LOST, WE LOST. Fist pumping air. The other team quiet, abashed, chastened. Good losers don't laugh last; they laugh continuously, all the way home so glad.

1. My son said Daddy are there words for everything? I said You mean the space between The clouds? “Yes!” “No!” Like those who love to think one word will take care of Maupassant’s tree and his landlady. But it turns out you will get no further than the words that reach and do not touch. X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country where They make their own cardboard. General words the French love, a thousand eyes but only one Kaleidoscope. Even Merleau-Ponty not specific enough (said Meyer) like very pretty exit signs Without numbers. Paul Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of that Nothing shines through. No grin, no cat. But I think: The world was made of gold, and every once in a while Some of that gold shines through. You. They say it doesn’t matter that you can’t read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. “Just leave it in your house.” Amazing debilitating magic at the door! If there were the right word for everything, each young philosopher Could dream without sleeping. Using the same ruler and we’d all Have the same measures and ladders without rungs, with regular risers. Music without words: it does a good job of caring about you, X-ray of thought the architect wanted. X-ray for the lovers— I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgive My antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. Even the literal is a metaphor. This is not nothing says the boy to the teacher who could care less. Multeity. And if I made up a word Would it survive like a quark of strangeness? Depends on which dictionary you’re using, I told The president of that company. And if you made it up, like a rare country? I loved you in the near distance like a word and rare cool blood. What was I thinking? “You actually think?” 2. family ways My old dead father put it to me Women of an “intimate” age Reconciled all separation He sung it out Oh family ways, ah family ways The song contained a pregnant pause pun praise Patiently he observed, as the rat jumped out Patient in music, patient in clay Patient in love and in death, a satisfied ghost

Dead before I came into this world, grandfather, I carry your name, yet I've never met you. I hear my name, and know that somehow they refer to you. When I scribble those six letters fast, to sign some document or print them neatly in a box, I feel your presence flow with the ink stain and burn through the paper, forever imprinted in my mind. Late summer nights gathered around the dinner table, leftovers being cleared away, faces clouded in cigarette smoke, I hear voices pass the word back and forth in reverence. Somehow I know it's not me the little one grabbing for attention. They speak of you, Andrei, the one I've never met, whose name I carry.

We waded in the shallows, holding his hands, then just fingertips, as his feet slowly lifted off the bottom. The land did not stop at the waterline, but simply became unreachable. His worn face bobbed above the waves, breath in an O as our words, fistfuls of shimmering minnows, scattered, lost on their way to him. The tide carried him out, then back a bit, a gradual letting go into dark waters, and we, still in the ebb, could almost mistake that O for the response we wanted— on the ins,I’ll remember you, on the outs,goodbye.

My grandmother Eliza was the family surgeon. Her scalpel made from a pocketknife she kept in a couple of pinches of snoose. She saved my life by puncturing my festering neck twice with her knife. She saved my brother’s life twice when his arm turned bad. The second time she saved him was when his shoulder turned bad. She always made sure she didn’t cut an artery. She would feel around for days finding the right spot to cut. When a doctor found out she saved my brother’s life he warned her, “You know you could go to jail for this?” Her intern, my Auntie Anny, saved my life when I cut a vessel on my toe. While my blood was squirting out she went out into the night and cut and chewed the bark of plants she knew. She  put the granules of chewed up bark on my toe before the eyes of the folks who came to console my mother because I was bleeding to death. Grandma’s other intern, Auntie Jennie, saved our uncle’s life when his son shot him through the leg by accident. A doctor warned her, too, when he saw how she cured. Her relative cured herself of diabetes. Now, the doctors keep on asking, “How did you cure yourself?”

That year there were many deaths in the village. Germs flew like angels from one house to the next and every family gave up its own. Mothers died at their mending. Children fell at school. Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left. Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one died. And the angels whispered among themselves. And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps, your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck when all the trees were still. And he would tell us always, how he had felt that night, on the skin of his own neck, the angels, passing.

around the house stood an orchard of plum, apple and pear a blackwalnut tree, one white pine, groves of white oak and willow clumps the home of Jessie was largely redwood blood, flesh and bone sprouted inside her womb of redwood for five generations the trees now stand unpruned and wild after relocating so many years before the War the seeds of Jessie have returned afternoon sunlight on the field breezes moving grass and leaves memories with family names wait within the earth, the mountains, the valley, the field, the trees

The food is on the table. Turkey tanned to a cowboy boot luster, potatoes mashed and mounded in a bowl whose lip is lined with blue flowers linked by grey vines faded from washing. Everyone’s heads have turned to elongate the table’s view—a last supper twisted toward a horizon where the Christmas tree, crowned by a window, sets into itself half inclined. Each belly cries. Each pair of eyes admonished by Aunt Photographer. Look up. You’re wined and dined for the older folks who’ve pined to see your faces, your lives, lightly framed in this moment’s flash. Parents are moved, press their children’s heads up from the table, hide their hunger by rubbing lightly wrinkled hands atop their laps. They’ll hold the image as long as need be, seconds away from grace.

Granny’s come to our house, And ho! my lawzy-daisy! All the childern round the place Is ist a-runnin’ crazy! Fetched a cake fer little Jake, And fetched a pie fer Nanny, And fetched a pear fer all the pack That runs to kiss their Granny! Lucy Ellen’s in her lap, And Wade and Silas Walker Both’s a-ridin’ on her foot, And ’Pollos on the rocker; And Marthy’s twins, from Aunt Marinn’s, And little Orphant Annie, All’s a-eatin’ gingerbread And giggle-un at Granny! Tells us all the fairy tales Ever thought er wundered— And ’bundance o’ other stories— Bet she knows a hunderd!— Bob’s the one fer “Whittington,” And "Golden Locks" fer Fanny! Hear ’em laugh and clap their hands, Listenin’ at Granny! “Jack the Giant-Killer” ’s good; And “Bean-Stalk” ’s another!— So’s the one of “Cinderell’” And her old godmother;— That-un’s best of all the rest— Bestest one of any,— Where the mices scampers home Like we runs to Granny! Granny’s come to our house, Ho! my lawzy-daisy! All the childern round the place Is ist a-runnin’ crazy! Fetched a cake fer little Jake, And fetched a pie fer Nanny, And fetched a pear fer all the pack That runs to kiss their Granny!

The way my grandmother put back the green bananas, unwilling to make an investment in her future, is how I’m feeling, watching my grown children watching CNN, sitting side by side on the sofa—no teasing, no tattling— just image upon image of Armageddon: starvation, explosions, long lines at the gas pump, and even the Rabbi abandoning town. Biological, my son says. And my daughter answers no, nuclear. I’m too embarrassed just now to admit how happy I am to have them home again, even though they’re only visitors, no longer “at home.”I built my house too close to the water, my grandmother used to say whenever I went away. She meant she was easily moved to tears, and it took my own mother years to teach me the impossibility of protecting the weak from the strong.Enough crying, she’d say, clicking her tongue like she was contesting the intricate but historical patterns of sudden death. Y ou don’t die so easily. You have to suffer first. She meant, I now know, to comfort me, to protect me from her brother’s tank blown upside down in Germany, the long lines at the gas pumps, the clergy blissfully following their prayers back home. O but then she’d kiss whatever ailed me, while my sister railed against injustice, her theme song exploding above the cushion separating her rights from all I’m still doing wrong. How can we expect world peace, my father would have said, —if he wasn’t at that very moment watching I Love Lucy’s slide across the world’s stage on an overripe banana— when under one roof my own two children can’t get along. As for me, just now I’m setting the table and filling the fruit bowl, whistling like Ricky Ricardo, unaware of his wife’s grand schemes, the well intentioned but certain and coming disaster.Please stay, Grandma, I say, holding her tightly in the aisle, unashamed of my tears. But of course, she died that very day, falling into honeydews, the melons, like hand grenades, rolling every which way.