248 Family poems

Bless this boy, born with the strong face of my older brother, the one I loved most, who jumped with me from the roof of the playhouse, my hand in his hand. On Friday nights we watched Twilight Zone and he let me hold the bowl of popcorn, a blanket draped over our shoulders, saying, Don't be afraid. I was never afraid when I was with my big brother who let me touch the baseball-size muscles living in his arms, who carried me on his back through the lonely neighborhood, held tight to the fender of my bike until I made him let go. The year he was fourteen he looked just like Ray, and when he died at twenty-two on a roadside in Germany I thought he was gone forever. But Ray runs into the kitchen: dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, pushes back his sleeve. He says, Feel my muscle, and I do.

I am walking through water with one of my sisters, the river banked with tiger lilies, the sun like having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dog ecstatic behind us, and I am yammering about my discovery — a chest deep pool, sentried by trees that caterpillars were killing with their yearly carnival tents. We reach then ruin the pool with oils and shampoos. We scrub too much skin from our heels, then debate whether to sunbathe naked: that is, who is hiding in the woods. We joke so long and rough the joke morphs, till we’re practicing for our future rapes: we both have numbers that we know are up. My sister’s ears are speared with porcupine quills and steel, but she’s placed her straw hat carefully over her stomach. As she talks I watch while dragonflies and other less showy insects land on her burning shoulders. The dragonflies present their stenciled wings. I can’t remember what the others do. My sister spits to clean each sunglass mirror. She wants me to hear how, when it happens, she’ll do this scream — but when the scream comes it’s just like she’s opened a shaken bottle of sparkling water: I am speechless only for the view of   her throat’s cushioned corridor. But when the scream ends her eyes have broken off from the rest of   her face. She takes our green net bag full of oranges, and slams it down on the baking rocks, beating the ground till the oranges soften and streak the air with the smell of   their breaking.

The first time my brother says ain't my mother pulls a branch from the willow tree growing down the hill at the edge of our backyard. As she slips her closed hand over it, removes the leaves, my brother begins to cry because the branch is a switch now no longer beautifully weeping at the bottom of the hill. It whirs as my mother whips it through the air and down against my brother's legs. You will never, my mother says, say ain't in this house. You will never say ain't anywhere. Each switching is a warning to us our words are to remain crisp and clear. We are never to say huh? ain't

As I enter the theatre the play is going on. I hear the father say to the son on stage, You’ve taken the motor apart. The son replies, The roof is leaking. The father retorts, The tire is flat. Tiptoeing down the aisle, I find my seat, edge my way in across a dozen kneecaps as I tremble for my sanity. I have heard doomed voices calling on god the electrode. Sure enough, as I start to sit a scream rises from beneath me. It is one of the players. If I come down, I’ll break his neck, caught between the seat and the backrest. Now the audience and the players on stage, their heads turned towards me, are waiting for the sound of the break. Must I? Those in my aisle nod slowly, reading my mind, their eyes fixed on me, and I understand that each has done the same. Must I kill this man as the price of my admission to this play? His screams continue loud and long. I am at a loss as to what to do, I panic, I freeze. My training has been to eat the flesh of pig. I might even have been able to slit a throat. As a child I witnessed the dead chickens over a barrel of sawdust absorbing their blood. I then brought them in a bag to my father who sold them across his counter. Liking him, I learned to like people and enjoy their company too, which of course brought me to this play. But how angry I become. Now everybody is shouting at me to sit down, sit down or I’ll be thrown out. The father and son have stepped off stage and come striding down the aisle side by side. They reach me, grab me by the shoulder and force me down. I scream, I scream, as if to cover the sound of the neck breaking. All through the play I scream and am invited on stage to take a bow. I lose my senses and kick the actors in the teeth. There is more laughter and the actors acknowledge my performance with a bow. How should I understand this? Is it to say that if I machine-gun the theatre from left to right they will respond with applause that would only gradually diminish with each death? I wonder then whether logically I should kill myself too out of admiration. A question indeed, as I return to my seat and observe a new act of children playfully aiming their kicks at each other’s groins.

Call me the bee buzzing in the museum. The younger sister fussing through a house still stiff with loss. The meddling goblin in the mausoleum. My dream: with three in the front seat, we drive under a bridge and halt. A huge gray bus blocks the whole road, including us, the only travelers who are left alive. It’s drizzling; the windshield wiper blades busily gesture, yet we’re nearly blind. You two seem not to mind blank windows, pulled-down shades. I mind. I want to get out and explore, to move around the deathly obstacle. “Don’t make a sound,” you say. (Who are you?) “Don’t go near that door.” Our mountain drive last month—that wasn’t dreamed. We three again. We ran a dog down. I alone looked back, alone let out a cry. I saw it lying in its blood and screamed. So tell me what these images portend. Am I a noisy bird of evil omen or just a person, apprehensive, human, moving ahead, kid sister into woman, stonewalled by death each time she rounds a bend?

The girl’s father laughs a little too hard when I say:She knows what’s important in life as his daughter whips the dime store jump rope over her head for the twelve thousandth time— laughs as if I’m joking, when really, she has it down— sparkly pink handles grimy with effort, her face obscured by her hair, shins thin and bruised, socks down at the ankles. Abandoned by the rest of the crowd, the concrete square an archipelago, an alignment with rigor the others cannot fathom, she moves with fierce persistence into afternoon, the heft of the handles, smack of the rope— no Double Dutch, limbo, no communal game, but this resolute definition of rhythm, slatted bench shadows lengthening into space, the other kids simply forgetting she’s there, her solitary corner of the playground darkening as the dinner hour approaches, while pigeons pause on their branches, squirrels come down the trunk and stop, with rush hour beyond the fence, cars idling, and the rope’s metronome, forgotten as breath, weaving all the disparate energies of girl— elation, fury, eagerness, song— into one singular strand.

"I gave birth to a princess," her mother once told me, and I thought of my son pouring his Grape-Nuts in the garage so as not to wake her, of the moment her baby, seeing her now a separate entity, seemed not to breathe, refused to blink her sapphire eyes. I remembered again last night as she and I crossed a Florida street, the caution light running gold streamers over the dark sweep of her hair, when a young man coming toward us halted midway a moment, stunned, before moving on. So what is this Divine Right—less than bloodlines, or more? More than symmetry of face or a silver necklace nestled at a flawless throat, the nerve to send back bad food in restaurants, more than the big, loopy handwriting of the generous spirit? Call it bravery, that eager readiness in the eyes, the quality of the light shining there. Call it blessed assurance. Today, pony-tailed, she luxuriates in sun, opulent in a hot pink bikini. In deference the ocean leans away, a backdrop. I find myself bent, studying the shore for perfect shells to lay at her feet—cat's paw, prickly cockle, angel wing. Call it homage, more or less.

Forgive me, Aunt Phyllis, for rejecting the cut glass dishes—the odd set you gathered piece by piece from thirteen boxes of Lux laundry soap. Pardon me, eggbeater, for preferring the whisk; and you, small ship in a bottle, for the diminutive size of your ocean. Please don’t tell my mother, hideous lamp, that the light you provided was never enough. Domestic deities, do not be angry that my counters are not white with flour; no one is sorrier than I, iron skillet, for the heavy longing for lightness directing my mortal hand. And my apologies, to you, above all, forsaken dresses, that sway from a rod between ladders behind me, clicking your plastic tongues at the girl you once made beautiful, and the woman, with a hard heart and softening body, who stands in the driveway making change.

I was one year old when my nanny went away leaving no memory of a face that watched, arms that held, hands that fed and cleaned me, left no record of her voice or name. My father died, leaving wisps of pipe smoke for a memory. My mother went away to write in London, left me at her home place, Ballyrankin, a sheltered farm in the Slaney river valley. I listened to stories from a paralyzed aunt sitting among sleepy dogs next to the fire. Statia cooked every day for the dining room, churned butter, gave sugared bread to me and her child Bernie, fed outside men in dirty boots and greasy caps in her stone-flagged kitchen that smelt of damp clothes, roasting meat, and cake. I fished for minnows in Shillelagh stream under ash trees where filtered sunlight made pools of silver water. On one side horses grazed and swished their tails at flies, on the far side cows rubbed their backs against low beech tree branches. My mother went away to hospital, left me with English neighbors, the Smythe Vigours’ hairy legs banged on passage floorboards, my bedroom filled with evening sun. They warned against crying. I cried louder. They took my pearl pink rosary beads given to me by a monk from a mountain monastery. He told me Holy Mary answered children’s prayers. A protestant child, I didn’t know the words, but I knew she’d hear me if I could catch the sunlight on her beads.

My embarrassment at his nakedness, at the pool’s edge, and my wife, with his, standing, watching— this was a freedom not given me who am more naked, less contained by my own white flesh and the ability to take quietly what comes to me. The sense of myself separate, grew a white mirror in the quiet water he breaks with his hands and feet, kicking, pulls up to land on the edge by the feet of these women who must know that for each man is a speech describes him, makes the day grow white and sure, a quietness of water in the mind, lets hang, descriptive as a risk, something for which he cannot find a means or time.