248 Family poems

The dead say little in their letters they haven't said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years. My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He's half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven't yet been born). He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot? Get out there on the floor and dance! You don't have forever. What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I'll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve. Surely the ghost of some postal worker still makes his nightly rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses. It's silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans? They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary. Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding,Love always. Can't wait to get home! And soon we will be.See you there.

When she comes back, from college, I will see the skin of her upper arms, cool, matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old soupy chest against her breasts, I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment, her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a soul in a body. She came into my life the second great arrival, after him, fresh from the other world—which lay, from within him, within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep, week after week, the moon rising, and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months, in a slow blur, around our planet. Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk, and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult to have her in that room again, behind that door! As a child, I caught bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds, looked into their wild faces, listened to them sing, then tossed them back into the air—I remember the moment the arc of my toss swerved, and they entered the corrected curve of their departure.

Holiday Inn kitchen, the day I am born: My father is frying fish for a party of seventeen when the call comes from the hospital. He stays until the batter is crispy, cold salads scooped on platters, rye bread buttered. Dad never told me this story. He told my boyfriend, one short order cook to another. Mom doesn’t know why Dad was late for her screams and sweat on the hospital bed. Once, when she was angry with him, she told me: When your father finally got there, the nurse had to tell him to get upstairs, “Your wife is having that baby now.” I hope that when Dad first held me, it was with haddock-scented hands, apron over his black pants still sprinkled with flour, forehead oily from standing over the deep fryer, telling the fish to hurry hurry.

When we talk about when to tell the kids, we are so together, so concentrated. I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m the killer”—taking my wrist—he says, holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him, as if within some chamber of matedness, some dust I carry around me. Tonight, to breathe its Magellanic field is less painful, maybe because he is drinking a wine grown where I was born—fog, eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that, I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life. He says he loves me as the mother of our children, and new troupes of tears mount to the acrobat platforms of my ducts and do their burning leaps. Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a moment, I imagine a flurry of tears like a whirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.

Korean monster movie on the SyFy channel, lurid Dora the Explorer blanket draped tentlike over Baby’s portacrib to shield us from unearned innocence. The monster slings its carapace in reverse swan dive up the embankment, triple-jointed bug legs clattering, bathroom door ajar, exhaust roaring, both of us naked, monster chomps fast food stands, all that quilted aluminum, eats through streams of running people, the promiscuously cheerful guilty American scientist dies horribly. Grease-dusted ceiling fan paddles erratically, two spars missing. Sheets whirled to the polluted rug. I reach under the bed, fish out somebody else’s crunched beer can, my forearm comes out dirty. Monster brachiates from bridge girders like a gibbon looping round and around uneven bars, those are your fingers in my tangles or my fingers, my head hangs half off the king-size, monster takes tiny child actor to its bone stash. Pillow’s wet. The warped ceiling mirror makes us look like fat porno dwarfs in centripetal silver nitrate ripples. My glasses on the side table tipped onto scratchproof lenses, earpieces sticking up like arms out of disaster rubble. Your feet hooked over my feet. What miasma lays gold dander down on forms of temporary survivors wandering the promenade? You pull Dora back over us—Baby’s dead to the world—intrude your propagandistic intimacy jokes, unforgiving. “What, in a motel room?” I say. Purple clouds roll back to reveal Armageddon a dream in bad digital unreality. Explosions repeat patterns like fake flames dance on fake fireplace logs. Sad Armageddon of marriage: how pretty much nice we meant to be, and couldn’t make a difference.

The dad. body has just enough gravy on his plate to sop up one piece of bread. So, enough for one supper, says the mom. She comes back to him, says don’t argue with mom, you’re a ghost. There’s enough water around to drown a cob in its husk. in a dad. He puts up weather stripping all night. to keep out the mom. He says I should have cooked for you more. She thinks she could make her own insulin. to keep from going into dad. She says I should have married a ghost. says: You have a little raisin on your lip. a little. The mom says stop all that quiet, it’s foolish. Come on now, dad. come to ghost. says the ghost. I won’t even warn the mom. I won’t even flinch if the ghost tries to hold her mom. After all, a good séance starts with enough food and a mom. The ghost with a biscuit in meat. The mom with the smell of cracked dad. sucked out of oxygen. The mom is a smell of wrecked vines. You, the dad. with no teeth. And no, (the mom) is a garden full of ghost. No. says the dad: lost in ashes. No city is complete. its own worst ghost. who can’t remember the ghost now, the ghost says: All your selves know, now. They ghost like the bushel of a snowflower. Everyone is dead. now. says, the ghost. The mom is a yard of blackening petals. At night, I have really long dads. Without the ghosts, I wake in a puddle of ghost. But you’ll be mom one day. to know I am alive. We are all sappy dad, aren’t we. Tell the ghost, it’s ok. Let the bodies lie ghost for a while. I mom of you. I mom of you a lot.

My name mocks me for I was born at the cost of my mother’s life, earning my father’s hatred with my first breath. All my life I have scoured a house soiled with the thick soot of his resentment. It has left its mark on the walls, in his eyes, and on me. All of it I have tried to wipe away. In my hands I hold a broom, in my heart— ashes, ashes.

Even when they danced, Dad couldn't keep her in his arms. She'd spin off, leave him to fade back into the circle of others, clapping, hooting. Days when the pond would freeze, mothers took their children's hands and worried them around in slow circles. Mom raced in uncharitable loops past me and my brother like we weren't hers. Same way she didn't see my report card Fs as Fs. She'd take the matching color pen and glide the ballpoint so it looked like the B was always there. You could ask how she convinced the butcher his scale was wrong, how she'd roll her cart away with three-eighths of a pound of corned beef, paying for only a quarter – fat trimmed, the way dad liked, but she'd skim that question like she did all surfaces, even air. Now she's given her own memory the slip. Doctors say there's no reaching her.

I asked my father, “would you rather die of cancer or a heart attack? Would you rather be executed or put in jail for life? Which would you rather be— a spy or a sentinel?” And he tried to answer honestly, combing his thinning hair with his fingers, thinking of something else. At last he fell silent. I ran out to savor the dregs of dusk playing with my friends in the road that led to the highway. The ball flew up toward day and landed in night. We chanted. Every other minute a truck, summoned by our warnings, brushed past in a gust of light, the driver’s curses muffled by distance: the oncoming wheels were the point of the game, like the scores in chalk or the blood from scuffed knees that we smeared across our faces: so when my mother called, her voice was quaint and stymied and I took all the time in the world trotting home past tarped barbecue pits, past names of lovers filling with sap, past tentative wind from sprinklers: then I was stunned to see my golden window where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots were framed by night and dwarfed by a ravenous inward-turning light.

I should be diligent and firm, I know I should, and frowning, too; again you’ve failed to clean your room. Not only that, the evidence of midnight theft is in your bed— cracked peanut shells and m&m’s are crumbled where you rest your head, and just above, the windowsill is crowded with a green giraffe (who’s peering through your telescope), some dominoes, and half a glass of orange juice. You hungry child, how could I be uncharmed by this, your secret world, your happy mess?