​All About Our Family


Early on, before Dad’s mind
went fully off the tracks,
before he had to leave home
for the hated dementia ward
with its mumblers and shouters,
it could be surreal—many
hushed phone calls from Mom
on the second line in the den
while Dad puttered about
or napped in his chair over
a book he’d been stalled in
for a week.  We’d whisper-
talk about his latest lapses— 
showering in his underwear,
slamming the door on 
the mailman who’d abruptly
become a Soviet soldier— 
and while we discussed him 
Dad might be standing at
a window twenty feet away
from her, trying to recall why
he held a screwdriver in one 
hand, toothpaste in the other.

Then one day my sister
on her visit emerged from
the den after a long-distance
call with us, only to find him
convulsed with laughter in 
the easy chair, phone on his lap.
“What’s so funny, Dad?” she
asked.  “There’s a woman on
the line,” he said, “and she
knows all about our family!”




Dangerous Tilt


In Grandmother’s photo album the whole world
has turned brownish gray.  Even the light into which
these woolen strangers squint is a flat brown gray,

gray of 1903, gray of the unendurable past,
gray falling over everything like tired snow.
This man holding a horse by the halter, unsmiling,

that stout woman peering into a wrapped infant’s
blank moon of a face, the hired man just at the edge
of the frame, rake in one hand, air in the other,

turning away from everything, his face a cloudy blur,
even his overalls become vague by the plain fact
that no one is looking at him—all these people

anonymous now, of course, and long dead also,
but more than that.  No one alive remembers them
or could tell you their names.  They stand around

a barn, a wood pile, a dock with four trout laid out
glistening, and no one has an address, a job, or a
future, not even whichever man of this group of four

posing with a dead buck hung from a tree is named
Phil—that being the name scrawled on the back
with a fountain pen, thick wavery lines in a style

you never see anymore.  Quaint as these men’s caps
and suspenders.  Phil was perhaps my grandmother’s
great uncle.  Maybe just a neighbor.  No one will ever

be able to say.  Even the pines behind these ancestors,
through which a lake or pond can be glimpsed,
are not real trees so much as ideas no one believes in

anymore.  They live in a language we cannot speak.
That’s why my heart seizes fast to the scrawny dog
visible in three or four of these shots, probably

brownish gray even before all the color leaked
from this year like heat from a pot of coffee.
It’s clearly the same dog each time—paying no mind

to you or what you’re yearning to know.  He’s just
sniffing at someone’s boot, or curled asleep
on a broad wooden porch, or stretched in the grass

chewing something—bone, rawhide—between his
front paws.  He’s a dog you feel you could whistle
to your side right now, if only your mouth weren’t

suddenly so dry.  If only you didn’t feel like that
shotgun propped precariously against a porch post,
about to fall.  Why is no one moving to grab it?

Why does no one, not even the dog or those three
muddy kids running after each other, not a single
gray-faced adult, notice that gun’s dangerous tilt?





Not Yet Smoke


When Neil Nellis went wide
instead of deep in street football
he got clipped by a delivery truck,
spent months in a hospital
and was never the same again.
Karen Ditaglio swung out far
over the river on the common rope,
dropped gorgeously, and never
came up.  Brian Russell drove
his first car into a tree first night
after getting his license.  And 
that girl in seventh grade, whose
name I’ve been trying to call back
for years, just got on the bus
one January in clouds of laughter
and went home to die.  A freak
infection.  On Monday the teachers
all looked carefully solemn,
but we had nothing at all to ask
the grief counselors.  We barely
knew her, and in a couple weeks
that girl’s name went up in smoke.
A form of grief itself, I suppose. . . .

At the fortieth high school reunion
we begin by counting up the dead
and lost.  We all look solemn for
a long minute of silence, then get
back to the dance floor, to showing
each other photos of grandkids
and vacations.  We the fat, the 
slow of foot, the muted, feel like
survivors of some big disaster.
By the end of the night we’re 
hugging people we never liked,
just because they’re not yet smoke.





Spitting Gravel & Ash


I know I’ll never again behold Slimey’s black Econoline van
that we rode all over creation those long summer nights
dark as the bottom of the river, firing up one jay
as soon as the last one bit our fingers.  But I know 
that if I just hunkered down somewhere on a county road
south of the Thruway or up north by the reservoir, if
I stood still as a stump and emptied myself enough,
eventually that van would swing wide around a curve
and barrel past spitting gravel and ash, with “Sunshine
of My Love” at full blast, maybe, or “Whipping Post,”
and I could finally get a good glimpse how far those 
headlights could punch a hole in that dark deep as song.





World of Fog

​
After sixty you wake up wistful
half the time, bidding farewell
with morning light to your beloved
dead, with whom you spent another
fitful questing night.  They waver
a moment like heat mirages in
the road ahead, then are gone
along with a snatch of melody
you can’t quite place and the faint
taste of vanilla.  It’s sad and not sad
to be the one who groans, bending
to pull on shoes, standing carefully,
then parting curtains to reveal
a world of fog, last porch lights
still burning and a night’s crop
of rabbit tracks crisscrossing
old snow in your melting yard.