Rooms Overhead
Thunder crashes like furniture dropped overhead,
those childhood angels rearranging their rooms.
Bureau, bookshelf, bed–grounded again, my daughter
shoves them across the floor, anger pumping her veins.
Soon I hear singing and know she is pleased
to be solving in space the problem that eluded her:
grownups refusing to be moved.
When I was a child and angels argued slamming doors,
I lolled, feet up the couch, head on the floor
envisioning other rooms silent and spare as ceilings
where weight couldn't go, nothing that breaks.
I couldn't budge a thing in the world outside
so I kept rearranging mine, loved waking to new
angles of light, books against a different wall
as if the same words might have powers I never guessed.
I heard all the shifting above, as if God wore boots
and strode through rooms kicking pianos, ripping drapes
while downstairs china rattled in the cabinet,
window cords broke. My father was already dead.
Now my grandfather began to mutter and glare,
my sister left on a boat for Africa,
Watching cracks in the ceiling I half expected it
to open on another world where the lost would be found:
a shaft of light, angels crowding my room, opening
drawers, spilling perfume. I stopped wanting those wings
and thought of a new language–shells, stones, hard things
you could line up and count, put in boxes, new words
strong as a shoe pounding the table.
Everyone looked up astonished as if the furniture had drained
from the room when my feathery whispers turned leather.
My mother wrote my sister, she didn't know what to do,
and my sister sent back letters to me, pictures of herself
surrounded by thatched roofs and vines. She sent words,
flashy ones that sounded like what they named: grasshopper,
thunder, a small rodent we don't even have in America.
All this was to say how big the world is, and don't be afraid.
She had a language full of phrases about how the sky could
blacken and crack like anger, the rain could pour,
and then miraculously be over, all forgiven, everything
clear, no sign except leaves dripping under a faultless
blue tropical sky.
Bayhead, New Jersy 1906
No one has thought about destroying the sand dunes.
The young man practicing photography, the grandfather
I have never seen, only focuses on the footprints
spreading across them, and the little boy sliding
down in high buttoned shoes and a white dress.
But the gets the dunes too–in shadow and light
their grasses bent, the sea breaking between peaks.
And the child, rubbing his limbs in wide arcs
to make sand angels, is dwarfed by them–
as though there are places where we know
everything that will happen will happen.
Then, movies are invented and the wind blows
footprints away. Dump trucks, bulldozers
tanks are invented. The sea comes up
to the road in winter. The rich build houses
on stilts, invent no trespassing signs.
Newsreels. Depression. Two wars.
Congenital heart disease. The need to know
where we came from. The necessity of proving
the dead used to live, the living
had fathers and mothers.
The Same Elegy Never Completed
Each Day It's a Different Death
for my father
Your life is over before mine begins
like some electrical implantation
that leaves just the idea of you
I used to know the difference
between you and all the dead presidents
you and all the dead miners
who were illiterate and drunk by 6:30
the people who did not die
at their desks well dressed
and in control of things
When the car broke down in a snowstorm
just outside Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania
I wanted to feel at home
Nothing of us may ever reach the stars
but all the flowers in the Trenton graveyard
have had their fill of you
