248 Family poems

When I feel the old hunger coming on, I think of my two great-aunts, A farmer’s daughters, Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota. I imagine the dark baron Riding out of their mouths, Thick-skinned and girded Against disaster, swathed In cuirass and chainmail and a curse. My hunger was theirs Too long ago. It swims in my blood, Groping for a foothold. It is the dark I thrust my tongue against, The wine and the delicate symphony That makes my head tick so exquisitely Tonight. My ladies, My dusky girls, I see you With your bustles puffed up like life preservers, Your needlepoint rose garden, Your George Eliot coiffures, Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine. You both took heroin. Your father never noticed. You sprinkled it in your oatmeal, Embroidered doilies with it, Ate it like a last supper At midnight. I know what you meant. There was always the hunger, The death of small things Somewhere in your body, The children that would never Take place in either of you. You were a garden of lost letters. A lust inhabited your veins. My addicts, The village spoke of you. Under your parasols, two rose windows, The world swam with color. Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak, You escaped the indecisions Your blood has handed down To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses As if they might have ferried you Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance. I see you ride the black hills of my mind, Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk, Galloping In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware Of something I inherited, The doubt, The fear, The needle point of speech, The hunger you passed down that I Possess.

Ah yes - they justify it all, the brats, hungry or asleep and gorged with milk. Each drop's (yes, the milk they drink is yours) another line unwritten, another page crumpled like a pufiball on the floor. Your limpid dialogue is reduced to the basic syllables of the cave and the quick infant minds grow huge, while you relearn vocabularies from the pram. The typewriter is now a battered toy, its ribbon has fingerprinted all the walls (cenotaphs for dead letters all its keys). You tap the heads assailing your broad lap and polarise regret and love them while the cunning offspring of your milk and blood root up the truffles of your mind.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

the place of consequence, the station of his embrace. Or else I’m not son enough to see the innocence and the spiritual fiddlings in the uneven floorboards and joists, in the guttural speech of the pipes, in the limp and the lack of heat. All we need, all we really need is light! And let there be a roof with no leaks. Oh father landlord, fill up all our breaches. He gives himself to the cracks; into the chinks my father lowers his bone, the do-it-yourself funeral. He holds the wires in his teeth. He strips the insulation back. If it’s black, it’s juiceless; if it’s red, elegiac.

1. This one happens in morning as a nearby crow wakes me, calling God,God,look at this: I am on the steps of a church, wrapped in Monday's Korea Times telling of the drought in Pusan. You can live by the water and still die of thirst, and I, there on the cold brick steps, am dying. But dying means the presence of breath. This one happens on Hangul Day, Independence Day in Seoul, where girls in purple satin hanboks parade through downtown streets. In this dream I make eye contact with every single one of them. Another boy, a few years older than I, rides a tricycle in the parade, trailing the girls. He sees me. He winks, as if he knows how everything will end. 2. This one happens in the evening just as daylight surrenders to the moon, and the flute of dusk arrives. It is cool. I am wrapped in a sky blue blanket, so whoever finds me thinks kindly of whoever left me. The one who finds me is a nun. She opens the door, looking beyond me into the tired night, then looks down. She gasps softly. She says,ahneyong, you sweet beautiful child. She bends down like an angel and takes me into her arms. 3. This one happens in the cruelest moment of the day, as heat curls flowers into dirt. A man, drunk with despair, screams at the sun. His sorrow is a collage of moths and ants, crawling from his face to his chest. I watch from the steps. It is the year of the dog and I am a part of it : unable to speak but an expert at listening : to the old man from Laos who sits on the steps two buildings down : he is telling another man how Hmong children become human on the third day of life, after the soul calling ceremony and the burning of animal flesh. He smokes from a pipe and closes his eyes as he inhales. I can hear all of this. I can hear a woman rustling inside the church. She is a dancer, so she speaks with her hands. I hear her rise, sweetly from her knees to her feet. This means she believes in dreams. I hear her slide her hand, sweetly along her hair. This means she believes in the sun. I hear her move towards me and place her open palm on the door. This means she welcomes me. This means she believes in the miracle of possibility.

The problem of time.          Of there not being enough of it. My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes. Numbers hung in the math book like motel coathangers. The Lean Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges, bubbly earth tones in the center. The latest thing they’re saying is lack of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough it’s not even an issue, time falls away into 'the curve' which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book, soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave) The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face lived for months in my dresser, no arrows for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio nose         (before the lie) left in the center;            the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia)                  I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room: Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrow- and-a-half when I started thinking about it; now there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet. Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . . Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. . Push us out in the boat and leave time here— (because: where in the plan was it written, You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water, even the caterpillar will hurry past you? Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark from being ruined. Opened the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:) “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed into a fourth dimension but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne. . . At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew. . . I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat, you were happy there; the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond, whichever one is eternal

Every morning, my grandmother cleaned the Fischer stove in the back of the trailer, lifted ash in a shovel, careful not to spill the white-gray dust.Precious, she said, her breath smoking in the cold.Precious in winter's first lavender not-quite-light—and you could smell it, the faintest acrid hint of ash, a crispness calling you from bed. You could watch her cap it in a chicory coffee can to stack among others, back bent from a long-gone fever.For the garden in spring, she said.

My father and brothers are swimming to the Rock. “Come with us!” they call to me and I say, “Maybe next year.” The Rock is very, very far away. I sit on the dock with my peanut butter sandwich. I watch them dive into the water and swim into the distance their kicks and splashes and elbows getting smaller and smaller as they near the Rock. It takes them a long, long time. They arrive and pull themselves to stand and wave their arms in the air. I can't see it but I know their hands are in fists. I can't hear it but I know they are cheering. Even the loons call to celebrate their arrival! I sit on my dock dangling my feet in the water counting dragonflies. My father and brothers come closer and from the water lift their faces with wild wet smiles And I think This year!

In the rental cottage it comes to me, how the four lives of myself and my brothers crisscross like tracer bullets, and how, from a distance maybe, if you had the right kind of glasses, there might appear to be a target we all were aiming at beyond that black escutcheon of cloud above Santa Rosa Bay as we lie on the deck drinking tequila and beer, our voices growing vague and weary as time passes, until one of us tells a story, more cordial than precise, about climbing to the top of a magnolia tree when he was ten, and falling. The rest of us draw closer around the story as we watch the great flattened cloud raise its triangular wing over the state of Florida. It is night in Florida and, in a moment, one of us will recall the time our father, in a gray suit, climbed the steps of an airliner bound for Paris and never came back. And one, or another, will tell how our mother, more blond and beautiful than ever that spring, said, You must now be soldiers, and screamed and screamed. We will each raise his head and stare for a moment through the lighted gate of the living room window at our wives, who are putting away the last of the supper dishes, speaking among themselves with the easy familiarity of women whose husbands are brothers. And one of us will begin so sing an old song that our father sang before he went away, a song about losing a fair woman in the foggy, foggy dew, and as the late chill rises off the bay we will all remember what we thought as children when we heard him sing of the woman who was not, and never could have been, our mother and of how an emptiness, bigger than an ocean, opened inside us, and one of us will say, I think it is going to rain, and we will get up and go back inside.

I’m counting cash in the backseat Of the Taurus. To Pop’s Repeated question, “Am I even Needed?” Mabel says, “I know the scene I want! Older cats are cool, Pop, I love you on those terms!” Toby thinks he owns The squeegee because his name Is on it, but he can’t Even hold a melody. Toby green Stupid shirt (and his embroidery Is shit). He strokes Mabel’s Neck, but she don’t want His Latin! Over plates of freezer- Burned cactus, Pop says, “Tomorrow I ink embarrassed koi, or at least The tiny stags!” “What is it,” Mother asks, “that will finally Relieve you of  this obsession?” After dinner I’m smashing Glass bottles, my hands vibrating — Exquisitely-timed palsy — Over beads that drop like hail Into the furnace where I round them For mother to arrange Into waterfall scenes on fabric. But she’s still in the H & M Filling her bags with beads so Venetian they cannot meet the eye. Meanwhile some teens Want to buy a glitter T with VISA. “Shit no plastic here!” I say. “How can I convince these kids To pay with cash?” “Not my problem, Bud!” Pop says from his desk Where he’s busy sketching Teams nutting in the orchard. Toby puts his beanie on, But it’s only August 3rd! Mabel’s tossing Gourds in fields destroyed By another mall, one big Meditation, soft, and already made.