248 Family poems

For my wife, Nālani, and our daughter, Kaikainali‘i, on her first birthday nālani clips kaikainali‘i’s tiny fingernails while she sleeps — “the rape of oceania began with guam” — soldiers invade okinawa, hawai‘i, the philippines, and south korea — #yesallwomen how do [we] stop kaikainali‘i’s body from becoming target practice — bullets fragment and ricochet —

It was Sunday, before dinner. My uncles were listening to the opera. O.Z. and I carried my brother in And laid him on the table. The women started screaming. My brother raised up on his side With dried blood on his hands, We killed those goddamn Canale brothers And nobody is ever going to touch us! The men shut their eyes and danced. We drank until morning When everything was quiet. They wiped their eyes, kissed us goodbye and left.

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family Sits in the sand Eating potato salad, and the undertow Comes which takes you out away down To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play Holler, say Help, help, help. Hello, they will say, Come back here for some potato salad. It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua, A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish And remote from this area as a camel, says Look down there, there is somebody drowning. And it is you. You say, yes, yes, And he throws you a line. This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

My mother the hard boned Chinese woman 23 years in this country without bothering to learn its language buys lean pork ribs special order at the Hop Sang in Chinatown and cooks dinner for an extended family of twenty-five during holidays. Seated loosely around the dining table trying to eat quietly I am scrubbed down to skin and bone, her oldest daughter— spineless, a headless snake a woman grandfather says who should have her tendons lifted out slowly by the steel point of a darning needle until she writhes. To my mother I'm useless but dangerous, capable of swallowing the family whole into my pelvis while I sit waiting for the boyfriend white and forbidden to touch our doorbell.

The week in August you come home, adult, professional, aloof, we roast and carve the fatted calf —in our case home-grown pig, the chine garlicked and crisped, the applesauce hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wine. Nothing is cost-effective here. The peas, the beets, the lettuces hand sown, are raised to stand apart. The electric fence ticks like the slow heart of something we fed and bedded for a year, then killed with kindness’s one bullet and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering. In winter we lure the birds with suet, thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat. Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring of wire that keeps the raccoons from the corn to the gouged pine table that we lounge around, distressed before any of you was born. Benign and dozy from our gluttonies, the candles down to stubs, defenses down, love leaking out unguarded the way juice dribbles from the fence when grounded by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe, how eloquent, how beautiful you seem! Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow, ballooning to overfill our space, the almost-parents of your parents now. So briefly having you back to measure us is harder than having let you go.

Ray’s third new car in half as many years. Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud. All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again. Somewhere in the bush near Saint John there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities. One week Ray is crocked. We’ve been through this before. Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress, Ah punka, you’s my Debby, come and ki me. Then the road ends in a yard full of dogs. Them’s Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me. And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor— rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe, and the inflammable mansmell: hair tonic, ashes, alcohol. Ray dances an old woman up in his arms. Fiddles reel in the phonograph and I sink apart in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down. Four generations of people live here. No one remembers Raymond Twobears. So what. The walls shiver, the old house caulked with mud sails back into the middle of Metagoshe. A three-foot-long snapper is hooked on a fishline, so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine. Then somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue. Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper is lugged home in the trunk for tomorrow’s soup. Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find that the animal has dragged itself off. I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh. Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms. When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands and the boys and their old man fold him into the car where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks and rattles at the bars of his ribs to break out. Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray sings an old song to the body that pulls him toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become screw their bones in the dashboard. His face has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived for a long time underwater. And the angels come lowering their slings and litters.

My father scolded us all for refusing his liquor. He kept buying tequila, and steak for the grill, until finally we joined him, making margaritas, cutting the fat off the bone. When he saw how we drank, my sister shredding the black labels into her glass while his remaining grandchildren dragged their thin bunk bed mattresses first out to the lawn to play then farther up the field to sleep next to her, I think it was then he changed, something in him died. He's gentler now, quiet, losing weight though every night he eats the same ice cream he always ate only now he's not drinking, he doesn't fall asleep with the spoon in his hand, he waits for my mother to come lie down with him.

“Dressed to die ... ” —Dylan Thomas Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still In ditches reflecting the odd, Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept Their own counsel, we Were different, we kept our own counsel. Outside the tool shed in the noon heat, while our father Ground some piece of metal That would finally fit, with grease & an hour of pushing, The needs of the mysterious Ford tractor, We argued out, in adolescence, Whole systems of mathematics, ethics, And finally agreed that altruism, Whose long vowel sounded like the pigeons, Roosting stupidly & about to be shot In the barn, was impossible If one was born a Catholic. The Swedish Lutherans, whom the nuns called “Statue smashers,” the Japanese on Neighboring farms, were, we guessed, A little better off .... When I was twelve, I used to stare at weeds Along the road, at the way they kept trembling Long after a car had passed; Or at gnats in families hovering over Some rotting peaches, & wonder why it was I had been born a human. Why not a weed, or a gnat? Why not a horse, or a spider? And why an American? I did not think that anything could choose me To be a Larry Levis before there even was A Larry Levis. It was strange, but not strange enough To warrant some design. On the outside, The barn, with flaking paint, was still off-white. Inside, it was always dark, all the way up To the rafters where the pigeons moaned, I later thought, as if in sexual complaint, Or sexual abandon; I never found out which. When I walked in with a 12-gauge & started shooting, They fell, like gray fruit, at my feet— Fat, thumping things that grew quieter When their eyelids, a softer gray, closed, Part of the way, at least, And their friends or lovers flew out a kind of skylight Cut for loading hay. I don’t know, exactly, what happened then. Except my sister moved to Switzerland. My brother got a job With Colgate-Palmolive. He was selling soap in Lodi, California. Later, in his car, & dressed To die, or live again, forever, I drove to my own, first wedding. I smelled the stale boutonniere in my lapel, A deceased young flower. I wondered how my brother’s Buick Could go so fast, &, Still questioning, or catching, a last time, An old chill from childhood, I thought: why me, why her, & knew it wouldn’t last.

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument once ended when his father seized a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurled it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus, and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed the people in his stories really loved one another, even when they yelled and shoved their feet through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle of cheap champagne, christening the wall, rungs exploding from their holes. I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury of the passionate. He said it was a curse being born Italian and Catholic and when he looked from that window what he saw was the moment rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk deep in the icing, a few still burning.

Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way —addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.