and still fair game. Here,
where everywhere was somewhere else,
and the street signs point to Paris and the
invisible city calls through its sarcophagus
a thousand years, we move like ghosts.
The light is not to be trusted. It has been so
easily redirected. We orient through
the night, following the wind, listening for a
sudden noise, waiting for the taste of ashes.
Legend
My father’s father rode the rails
west into Grass Valley and buried three children
in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.
Cold nights he saw stars he didn’t
believe existed, and heard wild animals
howling with a loneliness he knew.
Wife dead, every morning
he woke to the bread and chill, horses
snuffling in the dark. He’d starved
before, in Canada, winter so ragged it
killed the dog, and this grief was that
feeling, shifted north into his chest.
The heart is not a diamond pressed down
into something hard like rock, but, rather, the word
my father’s father said to himself
those too-cold California nights when
all he could see was the work ahead of him,
the dead behind —
her name.
He’d say her name.
The Unknowing
My grandfather was born after the earthquake and
fire, began work at four, buried his mother at six.
Summers he picked prunes in the valley,
sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.
He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum
in a packing-plant accident.
He didn’t make friends, a luxury
time could not afford, smoked
through college while doubling
as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,
pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.
A gift, my father was born at the end of the
Great Depression to my grandfather’s German wife — unaware of
the rubble from which he emerged.
A child among the fragrant groves
of Sacramento imported to give a desert
town some shade. Given a ’57 Chevy
at sixteen, my father rolled it twice
driving home from football games,
license never suspended, too easy
to make such things go away. His father,
midclimb into the airless summit of his
unexpected career, did not attend his games.
The sting of failure learned unobserved.
Davis, then Berkeley, then seminary,
where, among closeted homosexuals
and anguished penitents, my father felt in God
a familiar sense of bruised neglect.
He dropped out, worked as a prison
guard with teenagers put away for
knife fights and petty thievery,
one year, peripheral vision and dropstep
adjusted, never softened.
I was born in Cleveland, where he moved
for more school yet sensed the developing sinkhole.
My mother, cute as a young nurse,
from an Ohio land-grant family who paid her
credit-card bills. They lived near Woodland,
he wore zipper boots, drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.
It took years to conceive. Their gratitude for children
was immense.
A brick thrown at his head from a passing bus
reminded him that though he felt an outsider,
the color of his skin appeared white.
Nights in Long Island and then
Pennsylvania, his lips on our heads,
so kind as to be unnoticed. We slept unbroken.
I don’t remember once having dinner after six.
Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could
race out into the humid falling dark to hear
the pop of the ball against our mitts.
Thirty years after he left Sacramento, we returned,
his mother long since dead. The sun poured
down on our backs at the swim club, sunspots scorched
onto our broad shoulders. Waking to mists, to tinny clock-radio top-
forty hits, we sleepwalked to the garage
in the gloaming, where at five he stood
counting
