O Again 4. O Clavis O Key, O keys. I lost my Irish grandfather’s keys on a sidewalk in the snow. O necklace of skeleton keys. But I have his broken clock, and photos of his children glued in a celluloid box. O keys, lost keys. I was afraid of Opa who spoke Russian and German and Polish but whose English was remote. I have his silver and porcelain wine tray painted with plums. O lost Clavis, O Radix lost.
Tag Archives: family
A PHOTO OF BORIS
A PHOTO OF BORIS They posed him against a background of drapery, stood him on the seat of a chair with curved arms. His hair was parted and neatly combed. He wore a dark jacket with two rows of buttons, dark button-trimmed trousers, and sturdy shoes. They put a hoop—-larger than himself—-around his neck. The fingers of one hand curled around it. In the other, he held a short stick of the sort used by bigger boys to turn a hoop along a road. His expression was serious, puzzled, maybe alarmed: Why do they want me standing here, with a hoop around my neck? On the back, a line of my Grandmother’s illegible scrawl —I think in German—-and one word, set apart: “Boris.” There is no Boris in the family tree. The photo was attached with dots of glue to a page in a cheap photo album discovered in a box in a closet among my mother’s things. It was Grandma’s. Perhaps Mother never looked at it. She never showed it to us. The cover was broken, the pages crumbling. I know how paper can decay. I pried all the photos out. Most were not labeled. Grandma knew who they were: People in the Old Country around a table, people haying on the farm in East Germany where Johann ended up after the war, a uniformed man who might be the German cousin who went down with his ship in 1945. Only a few were labeled— Onkel Herman, Onkel Hans’s wife, Pa and Frieda. And Boris. I thought to toss it with the unlabeled photos— the sort of nameless photos that pile up, that we pass on endlessly. But I cannot discard Boris. What was he doing there, in Grandma’s album, with Johann and August and Wanda, Great-grandfather Joseph, Tante Helen, and Grandma herself, stout in her printed dress, standing with the nameless Sunday School teachers in front of the Cleveland Lutheran Church.
words: SIX TREASURED THINGS: A ZUIHITSU
rigid draw meadow peer lemon cap
(another one with those words)
SIX TREASURED THINGS: A ZUIHITSU
1. A rigid plastic lawn chair, one of four that my parents kept on the deck of their condominium. I keep it on the front step from spring till snow. I sit there at sunrise and sunset, watching the yellow light flicker like sparks between the leaves.
2. The white linen cap I bought in Traverse City in a shop that sold hats and, unexpectedly, wine-making supplies. A young friend told me that when I wear it, I remind him of Yoko Ono. I wear it often.
3. Our backyard. It was forest, then meadow, then lawn, and it is now growing up again into forest. We’ve reserved a patch of grass around the house, and bits for vegetables and flowers, but what was barren lawn is filling up with grasses and goldenrod, bramble and sumac, gray dogwood and pine and oak. Five years ago, I planted one solemn young chestnut tree as an act of defiance.
4.The drawing of a cat we had for a few months. Her name was Nanette, and she was tri-colored, and very small. The old woman who gave her to us could not keep her. “There’s something wrong with her,” she told us, and there was. In the drawing, Nanette is curled, sleeping, in a chair that once was in the living room and is now in the kitchen. The drawing was made by an artist friend who stayed with us for a summer—along with her husband and three children—in the room that once was our guest room, and is now the study where I write.
5. The lemons I always have by me. Here is a new maxim I try to live by: When in doubt, add lemon. To vegetables, to pastas, to soda water, to soup. The scent of lemon revives me and a lick of lemon opens my senses to all the good in the world that remains.
6. Ursula Le Guin wrote “There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.” I treasure a company of peers—poets, artists, women who keep doing the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.
words: SIX WORDS, SIX STANZAS
joy exhaust chorus toll appear trunk
SIX WORDS, SIX STANZAS
The steamer trunk might have been my grandfather’s,
but I don’t remember seeing it in
his dark little room that smelled like old clocks.
If I sit for a long time in this chair
the right words will appear. Like magic.
Despite the evidence, I still believe
that. Believing in anything now takes
a toll. There doesn’t seem to be a god,
for instance, who gives a shit about us.
It’s August. The dawn chorus is over
for the year. Sometimes, one dusty robin
lands on the lawn and hops around. The worms
have burrowed down under. Everyone is
exhausted by the heat, the drought, the plague,
waiting and waiting for some kind of relief.
My grandfather had a small life, and yet
he made himself a bit of joy. Magic tricks.
Walks. Old friends. Keeping all those clocks ticking.
words: ZUIHITSU for a day when there should be no words
soil
flight
farther
tingle
ZUIHITSU for a day when there should be no words
1
After the scanty rainfall yesterday (or was it the day before?), I planted beans. Six rows of black beans. I crawled along on my hands and knees to set them in the furrows and cover them with soil. As I patted the soil in place, I left my handprints to show that I’d been there.
2.
On our morning walk, the dog and I noticed a red-tailed hawk watching us from a power line. As we approached, she took flight and landed in a dead elm tree beside the newly cut hayfield on the other side of the road.
3.
Most days, I walk a bit farther than four miles. Today I was cold and wanted to get home to start the laundry. When the washing is all in the machine, perhaps I’ll vacuum the rug. That seems about all I can manage these days: walks and housework.
4.
Tomorrow—no—the next day—tomorrow is Tuesday—my husband and I will sit in my study and wait for the computer tingle that signals our son’s weekly call. It will be good to see the children. The three-year old tries to touch us through the screen. She has skin like a bisque doll, and enormous blue eyes. There are so many things she will never have to know.
words: Zuihitsu for the 51st Day
Zuihitsu for the 51st Day
1. I have never paced when I am in distress. I stand, rooted, staring, generally out the kitchen window at whatever birds I can notice eating the suet that we hang in little wire baskets from the canopy supports on the deck. This morning, I saw a pair of white-throated sparrows and a pair of catbirds and a pair of cardinals and a single male downy woodpecker.
2. The route of my morning walk is flat for awhile, then slopes gently downhill to a worn-out barn on the brink of a gully. Jim keeps old-fashioned electric Christmas candles in the barn windows. The road then slants uphill until on the left there is an unpaved side road going farther up past an old hillfarm cemetery before connecting back to a main road. My road flattens out again to a swamp where grackles and red-winged black birds and swamp sparrows are nesting now.
3. Our granddaughter extended her hand toward the web camera to show us a book. She recited Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “The Swing Song” for me. My mother, for whom she is named, taught it to me when I was three, and our son taught it to our grandchildren.
4. I wish I could come up with an idea for a big project: a play, or a series of poems. I simply don’t have enough energy to extend myself much beyond the usual “poem a day,” and even those are getting sillier.
5. Nettles are creeping down the driveway from the little patch I planted ten years ago so I could harvest them for tea. I don’t harvest them. I’m trying to pull them up by the roots so they won’t take over the whole place. “Remember . . /the nettles that methodically overgrow /the abandoned homes of exiles.” (Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh)
6. I told our grandson I heard a towhee this morning. Our son asked him if he remembered what they say. “Drink your tee hee hee hee,” he answered, smiling his slanty little smile.
7. My husband is extending his trip out into the world today—not just the usual route to the grocery store and home again, but a side trip to the pharmacy to get medicine for the cat’s hair loss and more milk thistle and vitamin D for us. He brought two pairs of gloves.
8. Linda emailed a poem to me, “the one she’s been waiting for,” she said. Nadine Anne Hura wrote it, “for Papatuanuku, Mother Earth.” She calls on the Mother to “Breathe easy and settle,” and tells her “We’ll stop, we’ll cease/We’ll slow down and stay home” It would be a change of pace—hell, it would be a change of everything these days to have a president who shares poetry with us, or who even reads poetry. Or anything, for that matter.
9. Just after sunset, I took Julie down the driveway as usual. It was clear and pleasant, so I did not hurry, but strolled along at her doggy pace. Watching her check the smells—deer? rabbits? that bear our neighbor saw?—along the way puts a fresh slant on things.
A zuihitsu is a Japanese form, consisting of loosely connected fragments written mostly in response to the writer’s surroundings. The word means “follow the brushstroke.” For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pillow_Book
Words: By Way of Contrast
coffeepot
filigree
chase
novel
BY WAY OF CONTRAST
Grandmother’s silver coffeepot—
fine filigree around the handle,
chasing and repoussé patterning the lid.
The matching creamer,
sugarbowl with tongs.
Her white linen napkins,
bone china cups.
My Mr. Coffee maker.
My red ceramic sugar bowl
patterned with spirals and stars.
My white creamer—novel souvenier
from Columbus, Ohio.
My red-checked tablecloth.
My heavy blue pottery mug.
JOSEPH TALKS ABOUT HIS OLDEST SON
JOSEPH TALKS ABOUT HIS OLDEST SON
After what we went through with him—
all the business with angels, and Egypt—
I was hoping things would settle down.
It seemed they might. I thought
maybe he could save the world
by being a good man, right here
in Nazareth. As time went by,
I even began to think he’d be
a cabinet maker. He had such
promise. He was careful, deliberate.
He had an instinct for how things
fit together. And he was good with
customers. What they wanted, what
they could afford. But then, I had
other sons to carry on, for Mary’s sake.
And Jesus? Well.
It seems he made something
of himself after all.
For John
FOR JOHN
Fifty years have passed since I learned
it is possible to hear snow fall,
it is possible to choose and stay.
And though times and places flicker
on the periphery and people come and go,
always you remain in focus at the center,
standing in the forest in your thin black boots
listening to the falling snow.
THE OLD LADY DISCOVERS FACEBOOK AND OFFERS A SORT OF APOLOGY
THE OLD LADY DISCOVERS FACEBOOK
AND OFFERS A SORT OF APOLOGY
All you want to do
is touch. It used to be easy,
while winnowing grain or stalking beasts.
Your bodies remember
the smell of sweat in the longhouse,
gossip by the well,
embraces under the trees.
Once you spoke while hanging wash
or mending nets or minding babies
or scything hay or boiling sap
or making shoes or spinning thread
or pounding nails or stitching quilts.
Now
you are scattered like chaff,
dispersed as hunted game,
and so are we.
Oh, children, do not complain at us!
We are as exiled as you.
Like you we want to find our friends
and digging is so hard.
Disembodied
as you, we post lines
and flickers to our tornaway tribes.
Now the ether carries in bits
our sketchy sentences, our loneliness,
tears that this strange communication
without skin or breath can maybe begin to mend.
I wrote this years ago, when I first joined facebook. Now that I’ve deleted my account, I find it intriguing that this was the original intent.
GladErrand 