I was buried beside an olive tree

with a lamp, three figs, and a loaf of bread.

I was never a mother, nor a wife,

my duties conferred to the sacred flame

to attend the vestal hearth in winter,

to bless the Tiber’s water with my palms,

 

and then relieve the burning in my palms.

The Sacred Way is just beyond this tree,

where my lovers visit every winter

to share my memory with leavened bread

and hold their blackened fingers to a flame.

I was never destined to be a wife—

 

They knew they could not claim me as a wife:

the random lots were held against my palms

and made my fingers curl into a flame

then open as a blossom on the tree.

My mother wept; my father gave me bread.

We walked to an empty house in winter

 

just beyond the Sacred Way that winter,

my dowry paid in full– not as a wife

but rather as a holy child, whose bread

had crumbled to ashes in her palms;

I watched my father pass beneath the olive tree

bending low, as a hand cupped to a flame,

 

his body disappearing as a flame.

All the days of my twentieth winter

were marked through every season on this tree:

removed from vagaries of man and wife,

I rubbed its soothing oil between my palms

and gazed from windows when we made the bread,

 

as I crushed the grain into flour for bread.

I pressed bellows, bearing the oven’s flame

to watch the bodies grow between my palms,

rising from dust, then hardening in winter.

I was never destined to be a wife;

to be embraced by lovers near this tree

 

or kiss their palms, which hold the leavened bread

before an olive tree; or lift a flame

to see their winter eyes expect a wife.

We remitted my father this year to the nameless earth,

where no gods churn the ground with their invisible hands

and no resurrected form yet retains his strange acuity. We eulogized him

then went about our business, dazed for a time, then made a vow

to spread his ashes where he and his wife had left

their disparate passions. The business of the living is to return

the memories of the dead to a verbal corpus and to return

their myths to a physical place on the earth

and perhaps find some measure of comfort in what is left

after their ashes are wind-borne. My hands

tremble at this thought, the emptied vessel, the vow

to ascribe meaning to a meaningless death, to vow to forget in him

a terrible iniquity and thus a childhood lost: yet also to find in him

such boundless joy among the Aspen and evergreen, the return

to the garden, before the temptation and Adam’s vow,

before he rose up from God’s cruel breath and the earth,

before his own trembling hands

had limned the contours of his nakedness, and hers.  All that is left

is this jar of desiccated dreams, all that is left

of my father is a thimbleful of questions.   I still see him

when I dream, driving an empty bus, his hands

curled about the door handle like Charon on his return

from the River Styx, ferrying me and my daughter from the earth

across the threshold.   Sometimes he vows

we will be safe on our journey; in other dreams, he vows

nothing, but is consigned to the end, rolling onto his left

side in silence like St. Lawrence on hot coals, the earth

finally collapsing in around him.

He was a martyr even among the living, and in return

we grieved at his every step downward, our hands

bound by his prophecy, knowing his hands

were summarily free to fashion his end.  Yet I vow

that this is not his end, and that in these words he will return

if only for a moment from the edge of that darkling plain, where he left

Blake and Arnold to confer with him

under the shadow of the Earth.

This is my wish, to return his voice to the living; to feel his hands

once more upon my shoulder as I walk the earth, and to vow

this is not all that is left of him.

Light, the broken order;

Hate, the ancient wheel;

Death, the open water;

Birth, the shepherd’s seal.

 

Sleep, the augur’s gamble;

Love, the upturned nail;

Joy, the ringing anvil;

Lust, the tattered sail.

 

Pain, my master’s reason;

Age, the prophet’s dance;

Youth, the fickle season;

Faith, my lover’s hands

 

 

Great uncle Harry was terribly scarred

by a kamikaze attack. Grandma

was a WAC—she was buried with honors,

having worked to decode the Enigma.

Granddad sailed the Indianapolis

then became a bellicose drunk. He died

at a family picnic, soused to the gills,

broke his skull on a rock. Uncle Don tried

to skirt death in Nam, joining the Navy–

but Uncle Jerry was forced to walk point

after he had twice refused to carry

a gun, and went crazy. My father joined

the Green Berets, was trained as a medic—

while doing special ops in the tropics,

 

contracted amoebic dysentery—

the doctors cut out part of his colon.

Uncle John was sent to South Korea,

came back with a limp and a crooked nose.

He claimed five black men kicked his face in

and left him for dead near the DMZ—

his son was in Iraq doing recon

last year, will go back next January.

Me and J.P. never served our country,

were never asked to sacrifice our health

for any cause. When dad left the army

he grew his hair, built a commune in Leadville,

dabbled with free-love, drugs, and Wittgenstein

and worked the graveyard shift at Climax mine.

 

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

—George Bernard Shaw

—inspired by the album cover of Ry Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music (1976)

 

The skeleton with a tan sombrero

copulates with an obese black woman.

There are five houses with broken windows,

behind them a rainbow fence, two mountains.

 

This is a portrait of you together,

the empty houses you have left behind,

the fence between you and the deep river,

the black mountains you escaped to at night.

I still remember you, señor, fondly,

the moribund thief from a shanty town

stalking my family in the dry streets—

who shook the shards of my banjo down

from the red oak tree, as I stood there dazed

behind the house— while at dusk, dumb honkies

licked their numb lips and mariachis played

double-time around the corner, singing:

O La Pistola y El Corazón

O La Pistola y El Corazón.

 

As a child, my blanket shielded me

from dangerous men, or so I thought.

When Señor Mora caressed my feet

I made a prayer to that tattered cloth

to make him leave my room, and he did.

When rebel bandits burst through our door

to threaten my family, I hid

under its soft skin with my sister

until they left the estancia.

On the day the Chimehuin River

flooded its banks, my blanket vanished—

later that night, I would discover

mother whispering by the fireplace,

Señor Mora caressing her face.

Fireflies brighten the grass by the shore

as you pass under the low-hanging trees

in your father’s green aluminum boat

above the submerged farms and rock quarries;

setting the lines on the branches, the leaves

just skimming the surface, you navigate

through an alcove, then settle in between

the bait cooler and the motor to wait.

At times, you see a faint light reflected

from the lamp on a small school of minnows

like silver coins flipping end over end,

disappearing in the darkness below,

while your father gathers a large white net

and casts it out, as if making a bed.

 

 

 Oil pumps rock steadily on the long ridge

like mosquitoes on a sleeping man’s arm

while behind the power plant, frogs emerge

from the black pond. Near a neighboring farm,

an antique radio phases between

“Mr. Sandman” and a faint foreign voice,

occasionally crackling into brief

periods of silence. The older boys

smoke cigarettes underneath a streetlight,

their shadows splayed across the white silos

in the feed lot. Every few hours, headlights

burst over the hill like a flare, a gold

penumbra on the horizon that fades

to a narrow beam above the highway.

I counted the telephone poles as fast

as the horizon could generate them.

Anything to ease the boredom: a vast

row of crosses passing along the edge

of the Kansas interstate—Spartacus

and his defeated men decorating

the Via Appia. There was a verse

my father wrote in the military:

six million miniature Jesuses

marching into the distance. As a boy,

I would sit on his lap to Angelus

as he read from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The void

is the hitch between those boxcars, he said,

connecting one brief moment to the next.

My uncle watched that tree all winter long—its patient bark,
the rope-scars catching dusk like half-closed eyes;
his boyhood ended there—a narrow pasture marked
by hooves and harm, where lashing is a sign.
He drove us out where ice replaced the shore,
a mirror set against the world’s return;
my brother paled—hands frozen to the door,
the windows starred with snow; the cedars blurred.
We shed our clothes, the snow received our weight,
then wiped our footprints clean as if we’d never come.
John cut a path the storm could not erase
and led us to the shoulder of the pond.
He walked the ice and summoned me alone,
his hammer fixed above the winter skin—
the wind returned; the cattails bent in rows,
my brother watching from the snowbank’s rim.
I held my place; the heavens offered no reprieve—
A boy consents. The ice proceeds.