limits, the steel-flanked beasts shrieking by
in their pitched stampede, we had our shave,
my resolute mother-in-law and I, so close. To Erice.
Our headstones might read: These ladies had intentions.
XIV. Palermo
La nonna cammina, she walks
through the hectoring fish-scale
cobble of the street market.
We are here to find her father
who cast off from this rocky island
a hundred years ago, hoping
to join his father on a Rocky
Mountain railroad crew, arriving
just in time for the burial cairn
of stones piled up beside the half-
laid track. Orphaned at twelve
in a roughneck camp, illiterate,
perseverant as a stone himself,
he labored the rest of his days
to bring what remained of his clan
to a new world. What could he
have left behind? No family hearth
or tilled valley; Palermo was
a village then, has spent the years
churning up fields and cottages,
growing tall buildings, and nothing,
maybe, is here for us to find—no knot
for a daughter to grasp at the end
of the long rope of this pilgrimage.
Our family threads its way through
brine-tinged morning light, a gloss
of eggplants racked like billiards,
long-armed men flaying anchovies
with the efficiency of seabirds. I follow
my husband, suddenly stirred by
the sight of his hand on her elbow,
steering his little rowboat of a mother
through this bounding main. Our
days alfresco have darkened his skin.
He could be brother to any of these
hawkers of Trapani salt or sardines.
Time and again she makes him stop:
These olives were Papa’s favorite. These
fig garlands we always had at Christmas.
She left this language behind at six—
firmly, like a hangdog pet that
followed her to the schoolroom
door—but now the words turn up
like found pennies under her tongue:
Arancini, melanzana. Oh, zucca lunga!
Impossibly long green squashes,
thin as a schoolgirl’s arm. He grew
these in Colorado from Sicilian seeds—
she remembers this, and the tendrils
he clipped each morning from the
ends of vines that always grew back,
brought in like bouquets for his
freshly minted American daughters.
Mamma boiled those with salt and
olive oil, and that was breakfast.
At a butcher’s stall we all pause
to gaze at ovals of glistening flesh
piled up like white creek stones.
My mother-in-law has no word,
so I ask, Che cosè? The butcher
winks at mothers and daughters,
points to the one man among us:
They are the things that he has.
We smile, embarrassed, and not
because we surely knew. Paternity
is the rope with no knot at its end,
the burial cairn, the garden seed,
the rigged mast of every ship
that had to sail. What’s left behind
thrusts forward. Potent Italia.
3
This Is How They Come Back to Us
Burying Ground
This cemetery is full of too much living,
leaves of grass exhaling
under our polished shoes,
trees too burnished
with copperplate autumn,
a sky too elated today
to revoke a touch our skin
remembers as kin, to cast a voice still in
our ears into the hushed ground,
and this air, too much like breath,
the children too wonder-struck with strange
fortune in this ranging throng
of cousins, their black skirts twirling
like pinwheels over the stony lawn, bouquets
of dark flowers hurled into sunshine.
Hearts full afraid of the asking price.
Too much for this day
if this is the end of the world.
This Is How They Come Back to Us
—For A. R. Henry, 1898–1970
I think of my grandfather Henry
with a claw hammer in his hand,
untroubled by the missing tip of
one finger, though it worries me.
I think of him spooning sugar on a
slice of tomato, the white mound
melting clear. Eating it for dessert.
I think of the teeth that are not his
teeth, slid forward into a bear smile
to frighten me, and then his laughter
that takes it all back, tooth and bear.
I think of him asleep in a chair, arms
crossed, as I have seen men in coffins.
I think of him scaling the college steps
to meet my grandmother, unashamed
to take off his hat and show the white
stripe above the burnished brow, the
face of a man who works in the sun.
I think of him young with still-perfect
hands lifting a daughter onto a pony,
teaching this girl to ride bareback over
the Fox Creek hills. She is my mother,
I am not alive, and yet I can see these
things because my grandfather Henry
is dead. All these parts of his life are
equal now, the end and the beginning.
Passing Death
—For JoEllen Hopp Petri, 1959–2006
For her children, this gradual dying
is like the tests at school that leave no one behind:
death mastered in small increments.
Last summer they lost her laugh,
the surprise of a marshmallow sandwich,
jokes while she folded laundry,
a sheet furled around the make-believe bride.
By then we knew she wouldn’t see their weddings.
In the fall they learned to walk the dog without her.
Running is lost before walking,
laughter before smiling, hope before fear.
The tumor presses each of these
from her mind like slick melon seeds
squeezed out of a fist until nothing is left
but the sticky-sweet cling of living.
A late-afternoon light touches her sleeves
but not her face as we sit at the table, unspeaking,
dredging prospects without bearing.
The bravelings whirl past us chasing the dog,
casting their sandwiches upon the furniture.
Their household has lost the word no.
When we bury her, what will be left for them
to cry over? Spilled milk, indelible stain.
One last ounce of a mother drained away.
The Visitation
—For Ralph Hopp, 1922–2001
The father, who knew how to fight
every illness and win, a surgeon
who reattached fingers and even noses,
defying all the laws of tragedy we knew,
now rests
with unease in his chair.
We’ve brought words
for repairing the terms of his valor,
but words are not his tools.
We are guards at a pillaged vault,
already dismissed from our day and
night shifts but lingering
anyway in the quiet living
room where he hosts
Can
cer as his guest.
The two of them are not speaking.
He is angry.
It can’t be helped.
Long Division
—For Dante Salvatierra, 1972–2015
According to the rules you stand alone,
facing off against the larger number elbowed
into its bracket: divide and conquer. But you
would throw the bracket open, walk right in,
persuading all those present to dance,
leading them outside under trees to study
on the grass of a child’s better nature. You
would always rather add than subtract;
would carry the one, on your shoulders if need be:
the bully-worn muggle with untied shoelaces,
the latchkey kids who pick every lock and find
their true home. They’d follow you anywhere. You
should see all these people who used to be
third graders, gathered here to wish for one last
thing, for the life of you. But this train has been
coming for us all, so long. You stashed your
absolute values in a river of children that runs
to the sea, runs for good. Now take away one, you.
The remainder looks impossible. How to begin
the long division: these days ahead, all broken apart?
Now we set our shoes to the pavement of living.
Now you pass through the brick wall of this station
to enter the autumn air of a better nature. You
altogether, one hundred percent.
My Great-Grandmother’s Plate
—For Lillie Auxier, 1881–1965
New Year’s morning, standing
at the sink watching new snow drift,
I cosset a hope that this weather might
persist, bundling a household
of family into one more day as mine
before the world calls us out again.
It whitens the woods while I weather
a washing-up from last night’s happy ending:
the grass-stemmed goblets, dorsal spines
of underwater forks, and last, the white
china platter with lattice edges, a gift
to my great-grandmother for her wedding.
I use this plate because I want to know
how it might make me one with her, my hands
slipped into hers like a pair of gloves as I lift
and admire its fragile rim, sharing our standing
as householders, dutiful washers of porcelain.
But instead, a presence from behind me takes
my shoulders, and I feel her dread of a snow
like this for her new husband’s sake,
a man called out to cattle in any weather;
feel her brooding on a shuttered-up morning
for its cost in coal. This delicate wedding
gift might plague her for the note her mother
will be expecting soon, along with other
good news. A washing-up left for the morning
would not have been her liberty. My hands
may reach but cannot share this porcelain gift:
the newest stake of her household,
the oldest one in mine.
Thank-You Note for a Quilt
—For Neta Webb Findley, 1920–2018
Your stitches still remind me of beans in May:
their bowed heads emerging in perfect rows.
Or blackberry canes that arch and fall,
marching across the hayfield between my house
and yours, quietly stitching our neighborhood
into one grassy quilt for the crows to name.
When you were a child planting lilacs here
with your mother, did you imagine the same
honeyed scent, eighty years later, waking
someone like me in this house, or that we
would sit on this porch stitching and binding
together, or that you would finally show me
how to fall in love with the time on my hands,
to plant flowers to outlive me? This quilt
is more than one of your winters, a falling-leaves
pattern passed down. It is the bed I am still
making up under blackberry winters come and
gone. The grace of passing over, passing on.
My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes
—For Virginia Henry Kingsolver, 1929–2013
At three in the afternoon we heard the death rattle,
sound of a throat that can’t clear itself anymore.
This was the cue for another drop of morphine, or not,
according to a nurse’s advice my sister and I tried to
reconstruct, as earnestly as we used to kneel together
to build our fairy houses of tree bark and moss. We’d
slept almost not at all for a week, and between us now
constructed no clear game plan on the morphine.
Really, death rattle was all I kept thinking. As if
the den of this ranch house smelling of sickroom
and dust, with its flotsam of empty Kleenex boxes,
its rented hospital bed and oxygen machine, its frugal
postwar windows and chronic gloom, had received
a surprise visitor and it was Charles Dickens.
May I say that life is filled with instructions
My father announced he had checks to deposit, so
was going to the bank. My sister and I locked eyes,
the old familiar rope of the drowning child. She
suggested to him that he might regret his timing.
I followed him outside. This is my family job, to say
the ungentle thing. Taking it for the team. I yelled
at him briefly. Then apologized. We were none of us
quite in our minds and anyway, who was I to judge?
As far as I knew he hadn’t spent a night or a day
away from my mother in something like half
a century, while I was off living my own merry life,
had merely put it on hold for a couple of weeks
to come and help out with the dying-at-home-
with-no-hired-help request.
Again I’ll step out
of that room to warn the unwitting: it’s a big ask.
My father came back inside. The three of us
sat in chairs arranged like planets around our sun.
She hadn’t spoken in days, or opened her eyes,
yet her gravity held us. Though not completely.
I’d noticed Dad now shifting his gaze, staring in
love and wonder at the 12×14 portrait of my mother
gorgeously veiled as a twenty-year-old bride, which
he’d set on the mantel to pretty up this departure.
The rain picked up. This storm was something else,
some wild stampede on the roof of my childhood
home. But she seemed shipshape, fresh cotton gown,
no furrows of pain on the pale crepe of her brow.
I took my phone out to the sunporch to update our
brother. I’d barely spoken when a bolt of lightning
struck the house. Zipped right down a metal duct
an arm’s reach away from me. I dropped the phone.
Took a moment. My heart, still beating.
The house, utterly silent. The electricity had gone
out, which made things seem peaceful.
I remembered oxygen. That she would suffocate.
I hurried back to the den where my sister and I
in treble octaves discussed the emergency
backups. Then noticed our mother was breathing
on her own. She hadn’t done this since last winter.
Around half-past, a shuddering little house-quake
brought the power
back on. We breathed.
My mother’s pulse-oxygen, measured by a device
pinched on her finger—a number we watched
like the basketball scores, like the polls before
an election—had plunged to the failure zone. Now
with machine assist she rallied back into the nineties.
Dean’s List. All her life, that’s where she liked to be.
This might be the moment to step one last time
from the bedside to mention that while we spoke kindly,
mostly, my mother and I did not love one another.
Ever, not even when I was a baby—as I’ve lately learned
from letters she wrote her friend from a cold plywood
house in Annapolis where I crawled up her legs and
drove her nuts, where she begged my two-year-old brother
to look after me, wished Dad would come home
from the navy and they could zoom away from us
in their aquamarine Chevrolet.
When women are instructed to bear children,
we don’t think of such possibilities.
That we are on our own here. There is no Dean’s List.
The blessing is that later, in better times, she had
another daughter. I cherished my sister too; it’s no fault
of hers that lightning only strikes once. I would be
the unspeakable first failure that stuck in my mother’s
throat, the child who would never be gentled,
or allowed to touch her good things, or even allowed to
take her to lunch, but could take the rap, the bad daughter.
However I might hold myself to the goods of my own life,
the too-many lovers, the eventual sweet husband,
the daughters more necessary to me than my two eyes,
none of this could alter the daughter I was.
But for these last weeks—
—but for these last weeks
while I spoon-fed my mother and crushed pain
medicine into liquid drops on her tongue,
did things too intimate to say—the bathing
and changing she once did for me, that trapped
her so terribly—through all these labors she
seemed to be sleeping but sometimes unexpectedly
gripped my hand, and did not zoom away.
She left on her own recognizance. No final
confessions, still the untroubled brow, the oxygen
thanklessly pumping away. The rattle went quiet.
The pulse-ox fell to zero. At some point the thunder
had ceased, the storm passed over. I have