248 Family poems

Families when a child is born Hope it will turn out intelligent. I, through intelligence Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope that the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he'll be happy all his days And grow into a cabinet minister.

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world. Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code. We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God. The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light, but we could read by it the names of preserves— outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night. A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel, before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky. To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”; liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.” (But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.) The sun was over our town; it was like a blade. Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms. Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.

I Here is your eye. Here are the alleles which give color to your eye, the mixed routes of reference, the million times more than anybody could ever be missed. Flock. The idea of flock. Hundreds of agitated birds swooping over the bridge. Our blessèd moments. Shapes of soft parts, a quantifiable relation to objects, we turn now to your vitreous humor. Shut the lights off, turn the meat down, cover your head. I started doing my duty. Graphs of a dancer’s movements. Ten sections of a neural issue. As from air to the cornea. Who in the person is larval or asexual. Who in the person will sit in. Hachure. A parallel walk. From one density to a different density. I was you, once. Come, come, under your skin. In the body receiving itself or its analogies. The my. The bow down before you. White pine to white pine. White pine to redwing to lantern fish. II She was full. She was full with it. III and then though through though and then through the loop just made IV Believe it or not I would swap his desire to see patterns gathering. Believe it or not we set off several long-haired bodies. Believe it or not that was the whole of our aestivation. Believe it or not stop talking about me as if I were not in the room. Pop open a new one. The developing figure was a monk bent over. Come allow us to see the sower sow. She contested the waters. Get thee behind. Something in her eye kept giving you the needle. Something in her eye kept falling out of line. Believe it or not three persons in one shadow. Believe it or not could you spare a mind. It clawed each thing as if a temporal sequence. It clawed each thing as if a temporal w/hole. Believe it or not six or eight ways of counting on your reticence. Believe it or not these long thin rods and the wider cones.

Of course we knew the “incidents,” the aura of Divinity, duck-and-cover in the parking garage, Gloria Swanson chinchilla redux, yes, he’d been a bombshell—the eyes still sang with the merriment of a punchbowl, fine wrists, that dahlia neck, skin bleached with peroxide, of course he swam in the nude, stashed gin in the toilet tank, stored stockings in the freezer so they wouldn’t run, had a thing for Adenauer, played roulette with the .45 won in a Cuban dancehall, raging along hallways, fathering four children, feeling the eyes of the back stairs, beck of the undercurrent, his own hand in his lap like an orphan, of course he gardened in Dior, of course he was flagrant, but what escaped us was the way he peeked into the neighbor’s kitchen drawers for something he swore they’d stolen, beyond the foreground obligation, aspiration insistent as a stuck car horn in the slow blue hours of morning, discarded affection, what escaped us was the dampness at the collarbone, the delicacy of the pose (cigarette and upturned cheek), the lingering by the kitchen knives, the bias cut off the dressing gown, break and fall, tumbrel of illusion— and what we wanted to escape: that he was ruthless, beyond hope.

We did not want to be unblessed, so we were blessed. Long, thin wire, a little patch where we might lay our heads. It was this way, this looking fore and back, a pole held tightly in our hands. You want to tell me what went wrong? Confusing shapes across a wall, depression in the ground. The gorgeous soldiers fought and fell.Hie unto hell. How we will lie in that brave grave apart, our aperture: a heart that has been ruptured absolutely by a passing God.

photos of her father in enemy uniform— the taste of almonds

I. Tonight, I look, thunderstruck at the gold head of my grandchild. Almost asleep, he buries his feet between my thighs; his little straw eyes close in the near dark. I smell the warmth of his raw slightly foul breath, the new death waiting to rot inside him. Our breaths equalize our heartbeats; every muscle of the chest uncoils, the arm bones loosen in the nest of nerves. I think of the peace of walking through the house, pointing to the name of this, the name of that, an educator of a new man. Mother. Grandmother. Wise Snake-woman who will show the way; Spider-woman whose black tentacles hold him precious. Or will tear off his head, her teeth over the little husband, the small fist clotted in trust at her breast. This morning, looking at the face of his father, I remembered how, an infant, his face was too dark, nose too broad, mouth too wide. I did not look in that mirror and see the face that could save me from my own darkness. Did he, looking in my eye, see what I turned from: my own dark grandmother bending over gladioli in the field, her shaking black hand defenseless at the shining cock of flower? I wanted that face to die, to be reborn in the face of a white child. I wanted the soul to stay the same, for I loved to death, to damnation and God-death, the soul that broke out of me. I crowed: My Son! My Beautiful! But when I peeked in the basket, I saw the face of a black man. Did I bend over his nose and straighten it with my fingers like a vine growing the wrong way? Did he feel my hand in malice? Generations we prayed and fucked for this light child, the shining god of the second coming; we bow down in shame and carry the children of the past in our wallets, begging forgiveness. II. A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charring body gives off light—a halo burns out of him. His face scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection. III. How can we wake from a dream we are born into, that shines around us, the terrible bright air? Having awakened, having seen our own bloody hands, how can we ask forgiveness, bring before our children the real monster of their nightmares? The worst is true. Everything you did not want to know.

A dinosaur egg opens in a lab And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam, Already taller than a man, And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran. I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide. He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried To find, without success. Jews grab The thing they love unless it’s ham, And hold it tightly to them lest it die— Or like my mother try To find the ham they couldn’t hold. A hot ham does get cold. Grampa, monster of malevolence, I’m told was actually a rare old-fashioned gentleman of courtly benevolence. At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely Dairy And park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors. The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda, Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda. Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot. There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at. The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was sanitary. B.O. was the scourge of the age—and polio—and bathroom odors. If you didn’t wash your hands, It contributed—as did your glands! His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards. The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards. The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine. It was fun. It was fine. The smell of rain about to fall, A sudden coolness in the air, Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest. I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest! It’s captain midnight ...brought to you by ovaltine ! I travel backwards in a time machine And step inside a boy who’s three feet tall. How dare he have such curly hair! A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River. They have a message to deliver To the gold-toothed king. Sire, we have a message that we bring. Little boy, approach the throne. Ow! I hit my funny bone. The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post. The weather was Antarctica/equatorial extreme. Surely summer was in error. Winter was terror. White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggs Versus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs. I loved both the most. Radio made women dream Of freedom from oppression and the daily nonsense. Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immense In the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so why bother. Why bother, father? Billie Holiday was inside. I thought I had gone to heaven and died.

Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth; Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father less to rue. At six months’ end she parted hence With safety of her innocence; Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother’s tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin-train: Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth; Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage, And if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry." For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much.