rel="nofollow" href="#ua7cf7384-690b-5228-8f0c-87ad2241da54">Most days you still remember
Are your flies grass, like mine?
“But we are different,” she said. “I would have us exactly the same.”
“You do not mean that.”
“Yes I do. I do. That is a thing I had to tell thee.”
“You do not mean that.”
“Perhaps I do not,” she said speaking softly with her lips against his shoulder. “But I wished to say it.”
— Maria to Robert,
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Strangers
At three, on vacation, my mother and I alone
on an aerial tour (two seats, no exceptions),
my father waving until he was very small
then unfolding the paper from under his armpit,
I wept with the depth of the assured—
the Ruahine Range irrelevant below.
My mother asked, coddled, pleaded.
The pilot offered ridiculous faces,
an early return. Only in the sight
of my father, rising from a bench beside
the helipad, hand raised again in greeting,
was my world, pulled apart, reassembled.
Nine years later his hand, warm,
was thirty minutes later cold. I watched
him wheeled away. I held his ashes
and wondered where to put them.
And I waited for his return.
I wait still, whatever sense it makes.
Alright, okay, we do not live forever. Our works
are lost and are not found. There is no consolation.
But, Elise, I read your poems today.
Each rose and greeted me as if everything
was normal, as if my return had been expected.
And in this act I saw my father.
It makes no sense. You would be strangers
if not for this. But I saw him, Elise.
He was your poems.
He was waving and becoming larger.
You ask me about my mother
so I tell you how she slammed
the trunk of our Toyota on my neck
when I was three and wandering
and she was in a rush for groceries.
No harm was done, I say, and so you laugh,
and I laugh, as does my mom
each time she hears me tell my story
which isn’t mine, of course, but hers—
my brain back then a roil of loose ends,
a squall within which stories wouldn’t last
unless she lashed them there: the scene,
the thud and wail, the nightmare snap
that might have been, the unexpected ways
that terror rises from its resting place
beneath. All these she offered me,
wrapped within her story and her laugh,
the laugh which smoothed the knots
and fused the sea
inside me.
Smoothing the Holy Surfaces
One winter, two a.m., his doctor’s
bad prescription setting in,
my dad went into shock—
my mom ten-minute-tumbled
his six-two, two-fifty tremble to the car,
the windshield scraped, ignition on,
before she caught a vision of my cherub’s face
tucked above my covers.
She scooped me up too quickly, swung
around towards the car, her ears
astounded by the sound as cherub-skull
thwacked
