The Fossil-Finder
One
Pianos
I saw them as a child,
in the houses of people my parents knew,
each one sulking in a darkened room
beneath arrangements of family portraits.
There I’d lift the lip
that pouted over chipped and yellowed teeth
and slightly press the lowest key
enough so that the bass note hummed through me.
I never heard the hours
of tortured practice or those mornings when
dusting hands stopped to tour again
the foreign shore of a half-remembered strain.
So much that wasn’t played,
the silence resonating like the dusk
that ushers out the fall, and yet
the portraits in their frames have multiplied.
Furniture now of friends,
undisturbed and undisturbing, the strings
ease further out of tune against
the padded hammers waiting to be sprung.
The Mummy’s Curse
“We’d settled in to watch The Mummy’s Curse,”
the pastor at my father’s funeral
informed us, speaking of his Dublin youth
and to our fear of everlasting life.
A silent film projector that his uncle
owned was set up in the front hall parlor
where everyone could see. They drew the shade,
a makeshift screen, which blocked the city lights,
and waited to be scared. When soon, undead,
somnambulant, the mummy left its tomb,
trailing its banners of embalmer’s gauze,
the room filled with expected gasps and shrieks.
“But then we heard these otherworldly moans,
and more with every step the monster took.
The moans grew loud—a chorus from beyond.”
They pushed the bravest of them out the door
and there he saw, like frozen carollers,
some passersby who, mesmerized in fright
by what they witnessed played out on the shade,
shared in the fear of those who watched indoors:
all scared of what was on the other side.
“But that was death made animate,” he said,
“and rightly feared, not any kind of life.”
That was in Florida, my father’s final home.
The pastelled friends, whom he had hardly known,
had come to pay respects. The following day,
we took him north, to where we used to live.
Once, since then, I had some business there
and made a side trip back to tend the grave.
Recent rains had soaked our family plot,
a low spot in the village cemetery
where the marker sat, a small boat moored
amid a large and motionless flotilla.
But there would be no rising from the dead.
I thought of what the pastor had implied,
and what my brother, later, graveside, said,
whispering, “Everyone we knew is here.”
To prove him wrong, I shook the spring chill off
and stuck a flower in the muck before
I drove away to look for those I knew
had staked their claims not far from here and where
I’d seen them last, when we were all still young
and on the cusp of things not named or known.
The maple-lined road I’d driven countless times
strobed in flickering bands of sun and shadows;
