248 Family poems

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him almost breakfastless. "I have called — I hope I do not err — I am looking for a purchaser Of some score volumes of the works Of eminent divines I own, — Left by my father — though it irks My patience to offer them." And she smiles As if necessity were unknown; "But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles I have wished, as I am fond of art, To make my rooms a little smart, And these old books are so in the way." And lightly still she laughs to him, As if to sell were a mere gay whim, And that, to be frank, Life were indeed To her not vinegar and gall, But fresh and honey-like; and Need No household skeleton at all.

Saturday morning two hawks flew over the soccer field and swooped in low as Abram almost scored a goal. Moses, on the sideline, sat on a stray ball reading a book, not looking up at the game or the hawks or his brother who noticed. That night at the Basic Trust Day Care Poker Tournament I got knocked out with queen/nine against queen/jack by Dan Shiffman who seemed almost sad to beat me. I sucked on ginger candies and held new baby Phoebe Kate, born on the same due date as the baby I miscarried. When she left I cried and had more candies. In the end, Josh beat everyone and won a 40-inch flat-screen TV. Sunday morning I couldn’t sleep so got up early, went to the Hell’s Kitchen flea market and bought a dining table and chairs from a man named Toney. Bargained him down to $690 (including delivery) because “the chairs need new upholstery.” A 1950ish Danish with expandable top and funny splayed feet—it reminds me of my late Grandma Lotty, her sister Marguerite, and the heavy-laden tables of childhood. I’ve no idea what it will look like with my small family gathered round or if I’ll overworry the polished surface. We’ll see— it arrives on Tuesday. This morning I got a stack of papers from sophomore lit. The top two had the author’s name misspelled. I’ve not yet looked at any others. I talked in class about how Art Spiegelman chose realism over sentiment, how we conflate historical time with personal time, how on 9/11 I took my nine-month old son to his first day of day care and the city expoloded, went up in smoke, and no one but me cares that he spent hours there, only nine months old, while we watched TV in our phone-jammed airspace, breathed in fumes, tried to give blood, wondered was there anywhere, anywhere we could or should flee to?— Josh called right after class and said he’d gotten “strong intent” from an agent who’s “all about the money.” Nothing disastrous happened this week. Not so far. Unless you count what I saw next, between classes on my way to read student poems at Empanada Mama’s on 48th and 9th. A teenage boy lying on his side in the middle of the street. The traffic stopped and a crowd watched while six or seven other boys ran back and forth and stamped down hard on his skull. I turn a gag into a kind of cough and dial 911 We’ve already called the fucking police, says a woman as I retch into an empty trash can. Finally three teenage girls surround the boy and the other boys move off. Later, on my way back to Fordham, I stop a cop and ask about the boy.EMTs got him, says the officer. They had no shame, no fear, even with all of us watching . . . I tell him. They’re kids, ma’am, he says.You know what kids is like. Tonight in Writer’s Workshop I & II I read two cantos from Model Homes by Wayne Koestenbaum and then “A Poet’s Life” by David Trinidad. These poems hijack form and make it present, contemporary, immediate. Look how Wayne puts a plumber and lovers, his mother, porn mags, fashion into terza rima that lead us along, punch drunk, addicted to real life. And oh how David’s crown of sonnets breaks our hearts!

You were in bed. You heard your mother working in the kitchen. It was still light, the birds were bickering, the waterfall behind the house was falling. Its rushing lulled you, you loved the moment you lay in, and you counted the time from this instant to this, and put it away to be lived on another night, your wedding night or some other night that needed all the luck, all the saved-up minutes you could bring it. Later you filled bottles in the stream and dated them and stored them in a cupboard. Months after, you retrieved them to stare at what time had done. You were eight, but already you knew it was working on you, each minute you passed through was gone. You didn’t want to give up your old clothes. You’d watch your mother wrap your dresses in a box for another girl and know that where their stripes and buttons went what you’d lived in them followed. But those minutes in bed, minutes of utter safety, you heard the water falling and didn’t want it to fall. You wanted to keep it, you saved yourself that minute. I don’t know if you still have it or if you’ve had to spend it on you or on me. But I know you still save minutes I used to think went unwatched into our account in time that allows no withdrawals. You hold onto the slippers and letters, things that are leaving, things we’ve left, evidence we’re judged unfairly by. You have the picture, you and Pam in blue fishing in the stream below the pool, staring back at the camera half-abashed. Your jacket is still in the closet. You never wear it, you don’t even remember when you did, but it’s here to testify the picture doesn’t lie —though the color’s different, your hair is shorter now, and the water in the pool is long gone downstream.

It was cousin Alvin who stole the liquor, slipped down Aunt Mabie's steps on the ice, fresh from jail for some small crime. Alvin liked to make us laugh while he took the liquor or other things we did not see, in Aunt Mabie's with her floors polished, wood she polished on her hands and knees until they were truth itself and slippery enough to trick you, Aunt Mabie who loved her Calvert Extra and loved the bright inside of family, the way we come connected in webs, born in clusters of promises, dotted with spots that mark our place in the karma of good times, good times in the long ribbon of being colored I learned when colored had just given way to Negro and Negro was leaving us because blackness chased it out of the house, made it slip on the ice, fall down and spill N-e-g-r-o all over the sidewalk until we were proud in a new avenue of pride, as thick as the scrapple on Saturday morning with King syrup, in the good times, between the strikes and layoffs at the mills when work was too slack, and Pop sat around pretending not to worry, not to let the stream of sweat he wiped from his head be anything except the natural way of things, keeping his habits, the paper in his chair by the window, the radio with the Orioles, with Earl Weaver the screamer and Frank Robinson the gentle black man, keeping his habits, Mama keeping hers, the WSID gospel in the mornings, dusting the encyclopedias she got from the A&P, collecting the secrets of neighbors, holding marriages together, putting golden silence on children who took the wrong turns, broke the laws of getting up and getting down on your knees. These brittle things we call memories rise up, like the aroma of scrapple, beauty and ugliness, life's mix where the hard and painful things from folk who know no boundaries live beside the bright eyes that look into each other, searching their pupils for paths to prayer.

I wondered if the others felt as heroic and as safe:my unmangled family slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead behind my flashlight’s beam. Stones, thick roots as twisted as a ruined body, what did I fear? I hoped my batteries had eight more lives than the lost child. I feared I’d find something. Reader, by now you must be sure you know just where we are, deep in symbolic woods. Irony, self-accusation, someone else’s suffering. The search is that of art. You’re wrong, though it’s an intelligent mistake. There was a real lost child. I don’t want to swaddle it in metaphor. I’m just a journalist who can’t believe in objectivity. I’m in these poems because I’m in my life. But I digress. A man four volunteers to the left of me made the discovery. We circled in like waves returning to the parent shock. You’ve read this far, you might as well have been there too. Your eyes accuse me of false chase. Come off it, you’re the one who thought it wouldn’t matter what we found. Though we came with lights and tongues thick in our heads, the issue was a human life. The child was still alive. Admit you’re glad.

forCora Though she lives in a world of Velcro, snaps and zippers, I'm showing my granddaughter how to sew on a button. She's nine, same age I was watching my mother pick my favorite one, shaped like a flower a child might draw, color of sunshine. Her homemaker hands held everything together, needle and red thread lickety-splitting up, over, down, up again attaching the blossom to grass- green cloth:Colors no bee could pass by. Now, before the last tug of thread through the button my granddaughter brought me, I point out the pinch of space—width of a scissor-blade—between it and the fabric, a shaft of stitches with a half-dozen twists of thread around it before tying off.Shank, I tell her, same as Mother named it. It strengthens the bond between button and garment, less friction than ready-mades, fasteners that loosen too soon.Like love, my mother said.Close, but not too close. A snip of thread and my granddaughter's ready to go, fluorescent-pink button back on the nose of her dog-faced school bag, the shank fixing us together in this world my mother could trust only so long as everything was done right, only when she didn't forget to check I was buttoned up proper, buttoned up tight.

for Carolyn Grace When she sits at the kitchen table while she talks her hands seem to balance in the air faithful at the level of her words; she is careful what she says. The morning sun through the window strikes her skin, shows how the faint lines in her palms will come to deepen like corduroy cloth to fit the weather of her age. Still a young woman, she has to work the graveyard shift, sleeps what is left then wakes to get the kids to school. It must be morning when she dreams. Peering into her coffee’s surface she looks back from its depth, her hands caught holding an implement, a fossil of her life: Alabama born, feelings huddled north, these steel cities this cold month, her dark soul twisting into fingers whose motion at this brown angle is the slow fall flight of leaves through time. And she rises with the gesture, and the oil in her hands is necessity’s sweat: each hand on the tabletop a work cloth rubbing the other fine wooden one.

She stands at the top of the stair as childless Tom saw her weep. Fatherless in red Spyders elsewhere rich daughters whiz through Paris or cruise the Greek Islands as non- daddy leaps in grasshopper fashion on a merry-go-round. Tall and bony they’re properly married, endowed. Spared such a fate, the richly poor country girl sometimes resented her tattered state. Having to seek treasures in a briar patch, she found daffodils and violets in dewy meadows mid-March. Now late in the years, the wind lays burnished gold leaves on her feet.

I could have anything I wanted from the maws of the vending machines that stood watch over the waiting room of my stepfather’s Shell station. Larry or Chubbs would fish out keys with grimy fingers, swing open the face of the machine, reveal its innards stacked columns of soda or candy bars. Outside the constant ding of the bell as cars pulled in for gas, directions, air in the tires, a clean windshield, drivers impatient for destination, and Chubbs or Larry would dash, leave me to choose: Planter’s Peanut Bar or Nestle’s Crunch, Coke or orange or chocolate pop. Grit covered that tiny room, layered on maps in their laddered racks, dusting the globe of the gumball machine, sifted over neat rows of motor oil in silver cans, smudging the white pages of homework I filled with painstaking script. I breathed the stink of petroleum, kicked at the legs of a yellow plastic chair with my black and white school oxfords, waiting for my stepfather who was supposed to watch me till my mother got off work. Nine was too young, she thought, to stay at home alone. But every day he’d disappear, banged-up Chevy gone from the lot, the men in oil-streaked uniforms shrugging excuses. “Anything she wants,” he’d instructed them, and I watched the clock as the sky darkened and the bright shell glowed against night. My new bra was too tight; I hugged my three-ring binder to hide my roll of belly from Larry, from Chubbs, and sucked the dregs of chocolate pop or lemon-lime.

My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man, not my father, as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed— my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know then and can still only imagine— for things to be somehow other than they were, not knowing what I would change, for, or to, or why, only that my mother was weeping in the arms of a man not me, and the rain brought down the winter sky and hid me in the walls that looked on, indifferent to my mother's weeping, or mine, in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.