A gift, you said, when we found it.
And because my mother was dead,
I thought the cat had left it for me. The bird
was black as omen, like a single crow
meaning sorrow. It was the year
you’d remarried, summer—
the fields high and the pond reflecting
everything: the willow, the small dock,
the crow overhead that—doubled—
should have been an omen for joy.
Forgive me, Father, that I brought to that house
my grief. You will not recall telling me
you could not understand my loss, not until
your own mother died. Each night I’d wake
from a dream, my heart battering my rib cage—
a trapped, wild bird. I did not know then
the cat had brought in a second grief: what was it
but animal knowledge? Forgive me
that I searched for meaning in everything
you did, that I watched you bury the bird
in the backyard—your back to me; I saw you
flatten the mound, erasing it into the dirt.
Torna Atrás
AFTER De Albina y Español, Nace Torna Atrás (From Albino and Spaniard, a Return-Backwards Is Born), ANONYMOUS, C. 1785–1790
The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so
we see him at his work: painting a portrait of his wife—
their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors
in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas
and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image
coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her
homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed
in late-century fashion, a chicqueador—mark of beauty
in the shape of a crescent moon—affixed to her temple.
If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her
beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,
the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress
with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,
instead, that the artist—perhaps to show his own skill—
has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing
his wife’s beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind’s eye
reducing her to what he’s made, as if to reveal the illusion
immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century’s mythology
of the body—that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone
with African blood—you might see how the black moon
on her white face recalls it: the roseta she passes to her child
marking him torna atrás. If I tell you such terms were born
in the Enlightenment’s hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire
is myopia, you might see the father’s vision as desire embodied
in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself
as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift
ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand
my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is
that a man could love—and so diminish what he loves.
Enlightenment
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:
his forehead white with illumination—
a lit bulb—the rest of his face in shadow,
darkened as if the artist meant to contrast
his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.
By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,
he was already linked to an affair
with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue
and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems
to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out
across the centuries, his lips fixed as if
he’s just uttered some final word.
The first time I saw the painting, I listened
as my father explained the contradictions:
how Jefferson hated slavery, though—out
of necessity, my father said—had to own
slaves; that his moral philosophy meant
he could not have fathered those children:
would have been impossible, my father said.
For years we debated the distance between
word and deed. I’d follow my father from book
to book, gathering citations, listen
as he named—like a field guide to Virginia—
a man’s pursuit of knowledge is greater
than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
I did not know then the subtext
of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—
the improvement of the blacks in body
and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites—or that my father could believe
he’d made me better. When I think of this now,
I see how the past holds us captive,
its beautiful ruin etched on the mind’s eye:
my young father, a rough outline of the old man
he’s become, needing to show me
the better measure of his heart, an equation
writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.
Now, we take in how much has changed:
talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,
How white was she?—parsing the fractions
as if to name what made her worthy
of Jefferson’s attentions: a near-white,
quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.
Imagine stepping back into the past,
our guide tells us then—and I can’t resist
whispering to my father: This is where
we split up. I’ll head around to the back.
When he laughs, I know he’s grateful
I’ve made a joke of it, this history
that links us—white father, black daughter—
even as it renders us other to each other.
Elegy
FOR MY FATHER
I think by now the river must be thick
with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us—everything damp
and shining. That morning, awkward
and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
into the current and found our places—
you upstream a few yards and out
far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
first you mimed our guide’s casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you tried—again and again—to find
that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps
you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the past—working
the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
for an elegy I’d write—one day—
when the time came. Your daughter,
I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
yo
ur line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank receding—
my back to where I know we are headed.
VI
Articulation
Repentance
AFTER VERMEER’S A Maid Asleep
To make it right Vermeer painted then painted over
this scene a woman alone at a table the cloth pushed back
rough folds at the edge as if someone had risen
in haste abandoning the chair beside her a wineglass
nearly empty just in her reach Though she’s been called
idle and drunken a woman drowsing you might see
in her gesture melancholia Eyelids drawn
she rests her head in her hand Beyond her a still life
white jug bowl of fruit a goblet overturned Before this
a man stood in the doorway a dog lay on the floor
Perhaps to exchange loyalty for betrayal
Vermeer erased the dog and made of the man
a mirror framed by the open door Pentimento
the word for a painter’s change of heart revision
on canvas means the same as remorse after sin
Were she to rise a mirror behind her the woman
might see herself as I did turning to rise
from my table then back as if into Vermeer’s scene
It was after the quarrel after you’d had again
too much to drink after the bottle did not shatter though
I’d brought it down hard on the table and the dog
had crept from the room to hide Later I found
a trace of what I’d done bruise on the table the size
of my thumb Worrying it I must have looked as she does
eyes downcast my head on the heel of my palm In paint
a story can change mistakes be undone Imagine
Still Life with Father and Daughter a moment so
far back there’s still time to take the glass from your hand
or mine
My Father as Cartographer
In dim light now, his eyes
straining to survey
the territory: here is the country
of Loss, its colony Grief;
the great continent Desire
and its borderland Regret;
vast, unfathomable water,
an archipelago—the tiny islands
of Joy, untethered, set adrift.
At the bottom of the map
his legend and cartouche,
the measures of distance, key
to the symbols marking each
known land. What’s missing
is the traveler’s warning
at the margins: a dragon—
its serpentine signature—monstrous
as a two-faced daughter.
Duty
When he tells the story now
he’s at the center of it,
everyone else in the house
falling into the backdrop—
my mother, grandmother,
an uncle, all dead now—props
in our story: father and daughter
caught in memory’s half-light.
I’m too young to recall it,
so his story becomes the story:
1969, Hurricane Camille
bearing down, the old house
shuddering as if it will collapse.
Rain pours into every room
and he has to keep moving,
keep me out of harm’s way—
a father’s first duty: to protect.
And so, in the story, he does:
I am small in his arms, perhaps
even sleeping. Water is rising
around us and there is no
higher place he can take me
than this, memory forged
in the storm’s eye: a girl
clinging to her father. What
can I do but this? Let him
tell it again and again as if
it’s always been only us,
and that, when it mattered,
he was the one who saved me.
Reach
AFTER MY FATHER
Right off I hear him singing, the strings
of his old guitar hemming the darkness
as before—late nights on the front porch—
the mountains across the valley blurred
to outline. We are at it again, father
and daughter, deep in our cups, rehearsing
the long years between us. In the distance
I hear the foghorn call of bullfrogs,
envoys from the river of lamentation
my father is determined to cross. Already
I know where this is headed: how many times
has the night turned toward regret? My father
saying, If only I’d been a better husband
she’d be alive today, saying, Gwen and I
would get back together if she were alive.
It’s the same old song. He is Orpheus
trying to bring her back with the music
of his words, lines of a poem drifting now
into my dream. Picking the first chords,
my father leans into the neck of the guitar,
rolls his shoulders until he’s lost in it—
the song carrying him across the porch
and down into the damp grass. Even asleep,
I know where he is going. I cannot call
him back. Through the valley the blacktop
winds like a river, and he is stepping into it,
walking now toward the other side where
she waits, my mother, just out of reach.
Waterborne
AFTER ELLEN GALLAGHER’S Watery Ecstatic
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind . . .
—Robert Duncan
As now, this meadow of seagrass, tangle
of history—a nest of myriad,
mirrored faces. How not to think of words
like cargo and jettison, each syllable
a last breath, vesicles rising to the surface
of the sea. How not to think of loss,
how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna
snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed?
Why is everything I see the past
I’ve tried to forget? In dreams
I am a child again, underwater, my limbs
sluggish as I struggle to wake. Always,
I am pursued. Waking, I am freighted
with memory: my mother’s last words
spoken—after her death—in a dream:
Do you know what it means
to have a wound that never heals?
And now this thirst:
how many times have I cupped my hands
to drink, found—in the map
of my palms—this same pattern: lines
crossed and capillary as veins
in the body, these willowy reeds?
How can I see anything
but this: how trauma lives in the sea
of my body, awash in the waters
of forgetting. In every resilient blade
I see the ancestors, my mother’s face.
Shooting Wild
At the theater I learn shooting wild,
a movie term that means filming a scene
without sound, and I think of being a child
watching my mother, how quiet she’d been,
soundless in our house made silent by fear.
At first her gestures were hard to understand,
and her hush when my stepfather was near.
Then o
ne morning, the imprint of his hand
dark on her face, I learned to watch her more:
the way her grip tightened on a fork, night
after night; how a glance held me, the door—
a sign that made the need to hear so slight
I can’t recall her voice since she’s been dead:
no sound of her, no words she might have said.
Letter to Inmate #271847, Convicted of Murder, 1985
When I heard you might get out, I was driving through the Delta, rain pounding my windshield, the sun angled and bright beneath dark clouds—familiar weather, what I’d learned long ago to call the devil beating his wife. I was listening to two things at once: an old song on the radio and, on the phone, a woman from Victim Services—her voice solicitous, slow, as though she were speaking to a child. I was back in the state I still call home, headed south on Highway 49, trying to resurrect my mother in the landscape of childhood as the Temptations were singing her song—the one she’d played over and over our last year in Mississippi, 1971, that summer before we moved to the city that would lead us, soon, to you. It was Just My Imagination and I could see her again: her back to me, swaying over the ironing board, the iron’s steel plate catching the sun and holding it there. For a moment I was who I had been before, the joyful daughter of my young mother—until the woman on the phone said your name, telling me I must write the parole board a letter. I was again stepdaughter, daughter of sorrow, daughter of the murdered woman. This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway—like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor’s tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay. When I saw it, I thought of how, as a child, I’d have chosen it for play—a place to crawl inside and hide. And when I thought of hiding, I could not help but think of you. What does it mean to be safe in the world? Everywhere I go she is with me—my long-dead mother. Is there nowhere I might go and not find you, there too?