248 Family poems

Mother said to call her if the H-bomb exploded And I said I would, and it about did When Louis my brother robbed a service station And lay cursing on the oily cement in handcuffs. But by that time it was too late to tell Mother, She was too sick to worry the life out of her Over why why . Causation is sequence And everything is one thing after another. Besides, my other brother, Eddie, had got to be President, And you can't ask too much of one family. The chances were as good for a good future As bad for a bad one. Therefore it was surprising that, as we kept the newspapers from Mother, She died feeling responsible for a disaster unverified, Murmuring, in her sleep as it seemed, the ancient slogan Noblesse oblige.

The last time I saw father alive he was using a black umbrella, closed, to beat off some pigeons hanging outside the marble portals of a museum. We were visitors, walking very slowly, so father could stoop and examine everything. We had not been in the museum, but were resting on its steps. We saw it all—the fountains, the statues, the parks and the post office. Cities are made of such things. Once we encountered a wedding coming out of the cathedral and were caught in a shower of rice; as the bride flicked her veiled head father licked his little finger and in this way saved a grain. On the next block he announced he was going to heaven. But first let’s go back to the hotel and rest, he said: I want my mint. Those were practically his last words. And what did I want more than anything in the world? Probably the ancient Polish recipe for blood soup, which was finally told to me in an empty deli in a deserted mill town in western Massachusetts by the owner’s mother, who was alone one day when I burst in and demanded a bowl. But, she said, lacing her fingers around a jar of morello cherries, it requires one cup of new blood drawn from the goose whose neck you’ve just wrung to put in the pot, and where in these days can I find anything as fresh as that? I had lost track of my life before, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of wayfarer’s bliss when she continued to list, one by one, the impossible ingredients I needed to live. We sat at the greasy table far into the night, while snow fell on the locked doors of the church next door, dedicated to St. Stanislas, which was rumored to be beautiful inside, and contain the remains of his beloved head.

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm stone through liquid swimming between us. The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit. Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second chance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest.

She would post herself in the way in lines headed to transfer stops, to change, or haunt intersections with four way full scarecrow indecision, stop on the corners of streets, and in the aisles of buses, preaching only that which has never left these crossings for road, for choice    — the angry fear.       She seats at the feasts   — Thanksgiving, any holiday, any family place setting   — the hunger of others’ satisfaction for herself, she seeks it said this is what she deserves, if only of herself. What she thinks she thinks needs to be said whatever anyone else thinks to be honest. So there she sings from that part of the door she’s never got through, the eye which requires it all taken   off    down all blown away    to get through to that still naked-ness of clear again even if she’s not        still, the voice comes through that if we could listen as she is equally raw    hear with meat and gut below the skin, beyond the last violence, to the silence just before the bone      if we could still hear there we’d hear 2 What hand can you offer one wanting just to get even for what it doesn’t know what, just to take out what it feels on someone else to hurt because it can’t get at where it hurts      itself to have to see to clear like a movie fakes done seeing sharper than thought can cut to it; what hand can you offer one that doesn’t know even as a balance any other than more as my half and who counts itself that much     more and that more proofless     multiple unanswerably human hurts because it can’t figure out a figure to answer how it wants so count doesn’t count higher than want and want also falls short enough to take someone down for it but there is no size for another to be cut down to but none but death    this is so frustrating 3 You see me get the hell away from her don’t you     quick as I can    and I bein nice she act all girlfriend but that bitch dangerous she pull so much rotten shit on peoples she due to get her ass killed anytime and I don’t tend to be nowhere near round I ain’t getting cut down just for standin next to her     I ain’t all that innocent but I don’t be lookin for nothing I don’t deserve

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt, And lived in a small house near a fashionable square Cared for by servants to the number of four. Now when she died there was silence in heaven And silence at her end of the street. The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet — He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before. The dogs were handsomely provided for, But shortly afterwards the parrot died too. The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece, And the footman sat upon the dining-table Holding the second housemaid on his knees — Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

There's a way a woman will not relinquish her pocketbook even pulled onstage, or called up to the pulpit— there's a way only your Auntie can make it taste right— rice & gravy is a meal if my late Great Aunt Toota makes it— Aunts cook like there's no tomorrow & they're right. Too hot is how my Aunt Tuddie peppers everything, her name given by my father, four, seeing her smiling in her crib. There's a barrel full of rainwater beside the house that my infant father will fall into, trying to see himself—the bottom— & there's his sister Margie yanking him out by his hair grown long as superstition. Never mind the flyswatter they chase you round the house & into the yard with ready to whup the daylights out of you— that's only a threat— Aunties will fix you potato salad & save you some. Godmothers, godsends, Aunts smoke like it's going out of style— & it is— make even gold teeth look right, shining. saying I'll be John, with a sigh. Make way out of no way— keep they key to the scale that weighed the cotton, the cane we raised more than our share of— If not them, then who will win heaven? holding tight to their pocketbooks at the pearly gates just in case.

I like it when they get together and talk in voices that sound like apple trees and grape vines, and some of them wear hats and go to Arizona in the winter, and they all like to play cards. They will always be the ones who say “It is time to go now,” even as we linger at the door, or stand by the waiting cars, they remember someone—an uncle we never knew—and sigh, all of them together, like wind in the oak trees behind the farm where they grew up—a place I remember—especially the hen house and the soft clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

My father built a great worry around me like a dock Once I left it before I was finished And he remained with his great, empty worry. And my mother—like a tree on the shore Between her arms outstretched for me. And in '31 my hands were merry and small And in '41 they learned to use a rifle And when I loved my first love My thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons And the girl's white hand clutched them all With a thin string—and then let them fly. And in '51 the movement of my life Was like the movement of many slaves rowing a ship, And the face of my father like the lantern at the end of a parting train, And my mother closed all the clouds in her brown closet. And I climbed up my street, And the twentieth century was the blood in my veins, Blood that wanted to go out to many wars, Through many openings. It pounds on my head from inside And moves in angry waves to my heart. But now, in the spring of '52, I see More birds have returned than left last winter. And I return down the slope of the mountain To my room where the woman's body is heavy And full of time.

The volcano in my grandmother's Mexican village smothered the town, though the girl escaped because the axis of revolution sent her family into exile, black clouds covering their journey to the north. The axis of the earth is a skeletal bone extending from pole to pole, the arm of someone holding on. The Japanese earthquake shifted the axis of the earth, moving Japan twelve feet closer to North America, each day shortened by one second. When a poet said the past never happens because it is always present, the other one proclaimed the past is in the future, the axis bending to allow these words to skip the water like stones thrown by a boy in search of his father, the axis of yesterday sinking the stones the boy hurled across the pond.

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields, looking for God knows what. Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing. Something to fill an empty spot. Maybe a luminous angel or a country girl with a secret dark. He came back empty-handed, or so I thought. Now I find them: thistles, goatheads, the barbed weeds all those with hooks or horns the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones those wearing lantern jaws, old ones in beards, leapers in silk leggings, the multiple pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those with juices and saps like the fingers of thieves nation after nation of grasses that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds and grab handholds in whatever lean place. It’s been a good day.