We don’t stop aging in winter

In the morning shower when my brain
is clean and fresh, I divert the tumble
of my thoughts away from Jack the night
my father died. This memory is warm
but the next? How dark and cold, and
how slippery might it be? I leave it
lodged where ground slides into fog
this dark compressed day of winter
and lift my shoulders from their crouch.

Night after night, practicing this skill,
gradually gave me back my sleep.
It isn’t looking at the world through
rose colored glasses. It isn’t looking.

The Jay Calls

Birds erupt outside my hotel window.
Cardinal, wren, robin.
Yack Yack Yack. All aflutter.

Is it about to rain or has Jack returned from nowhere?

He used to stay in the canopy riding the waves
wind and currents presented him,
but the leaves are still against the sky.

Was there ever anything more beautiful
than his sea soaked eyelashes when he tired
and came back dripping to his towel?

The jay calls.

So thirsty he was. Still I can’t look to see his face.

Settled

Jack's tombstone wears the oak's mantel:

lichens rust the pink granite; tannins set

his name and the chiseled teak pattern

in relief. His view is good. The trees cast

long stark shadows down the green slope.

A jogger in a red jacket makes his way

along the drive. I expect a blue jay to perch

atop the stone but they accept Jack's claim.

Together the robins and blue jays watch me

listen as the Gladstone passes this good spot.

Passaic Headwaters

I came here a lot with Jack after he died.
Now I’m back for the wood thrush I suppose,
and the gnats and mosquitoes.

I take my time along the path. My phone and I
listen for birds. A woodpecker drums
to tell his mate he’s near. My guess a flicker.

Where the sun breaks through the canopy
the smell of warm earth envelops me.
I feel the plants' breath. It's almost visible.

Fronds and leaves and limbs extend.
Some itchy, some sticky. Some burn.
The trail cuts back and the headwaters

are suddenly as loud as a boy splashing down
a ledge or two then quieting into the flowing creek.
I find his spot. It isn’t hard; it’s where sneakers

get soaked through and through. I kneel. Feel
the cool stone through my jeans. Surely spring rains
and snow melt years ago carried him to sea.

A blue jay calls from deep in the leaves. Muffled.
No barking. No giggling. No chasing fireflies.
A common jeering blue jay almost makes me cry.

He calls again.

Belt

We saw Pisa but you'll never see Venice.

There is a photo in front of me now--

you in my arms, Libby at my side--three

of us leaning, making the tower right.

That's one thing my therapist would say:

You feel guilty. I’d disagree, but he kept

coming back to it. I’d say I’m hard on myself,

a perfectionist. Take tennis I'd say,

I focus on the work not on winning.

Between half my age and hip the men are

who tuck their shirts these days into jeans.

I rescued a few button downs worn more

than a decade ago at the office

and in business class lounges far away

from home. Far away from you and Libby.

I committed to Hilary I’d wear them

in Venice--not just sackcloth and flannels.

It wasn’t just the sorting and packing

and the move; it was soccer again.

I replaced the belt. The one with a steel

tip and buckle, disintegrating as we speak

by sweat, and bending and sawing and tearing

autumn olive out of the ground. I will

have a stove at the cabin with a fire

you'll never feed. I want to feel less bad.

Guilt is flowering on barren ground.

Flight Call

A still day in early August.
I’m cool in the shade of an old maple
on a good bench to sit for birds.

Chickadees are chatting
but they can’t hold my interest.
Spring is over. All the singing

for territory, for a mate, for your brood

is done, but I don’t want to leave.

Nowhere will ease the anniversary.

A careening train of boys on bikes
comes skidding down the path.
A junco bolts.

The boys are breaking rules
but they easily avoid hitting me

and go on as if I'm not here.

If they were a year or two older,
I’m sure I would have felt again
that familiar fever spike of fury.

I wait the minutes for the birds to calm
and try to recall which have a flight call.
I missed Jack's.

I am still angry a week later.
Just ask her who lives with me
how I endure without his song.

Prayer from Gray’s River

Prayer from Gray’s River

When a mother kills the light in her son’s eyes
god moves stone like water for miles
and ash rains for months.

I collect mudstone from a bleached river bed
exposed by floods that come
most winters. I build

a cairn on my window sill. If I leave
the cairn sit memories leach
away so sometimes

when I’m strong I take a piece and taste the grit.
The last time I admonished Jack
I can’t recall my words

but under a glaring sun, I see his flushed cheeks,
his sweat-matted hair brushed back. I see
tears as he watches me

instruct him to work harder with the same eyes
that challenged his mother. It’s not like
I’m going to die!

he vowed two nights before she drugged him and
drowned him with a pillow.

The memory is unlithified--I return it
gently--undo only the slightest
flake with my breath.

(previous draft: click here.)

Prayer at Gray’s River

Prayer at Gray’s River

When a mother seizes one life
god moves mudstone like water
for miles toward the Pacific
and ash rains for months.

I build a little cairn from mudstone
crumbling along a bleached river bed
exposed by floods most winters.
If I leave the cairn sit,

Jack’s memories leach away.
So sometimes when I’m strong
I take one shard from the top
and taste the grit.

The stone is weak, unlithified,
like my memories.
I place it back gently--
undo only the slightest fleck

with my breath. The last time
I admonished Jack
I can’t remember my words
but I do see a glaring sun

and his cheeks flushed from drills
his sweat-matted hair
brushed back, the tears in his eyes
while he watches me instruct him to work harder

with the same eyes that challenged his mother,
It’s not like I’m going to die!
he vowed, two nights before she drugged him
and drowned him with a pillow.

The Black Sun

The Black Sun

1.
I sit far back from the center where people walk
their strollers and throw frisbees. Depending on what
the wind is saying I sit in or out of the late afternoon sun.
A small pool beside me collects coins. My focal point
is a big round polished piece of black granite,
an obelisk rolled upon itself glazed and lumpy
like a chocolate donut. It must have arranged my chair.
I survey the orange and red flowers in rows,
the reservoir, the redwoods, and after each in turn
I’m returned to Noguchi's Black Sun.

2.
Back a second hotter day I take the same chair.
The fountain is raucous. I smell chlorine in cool
mist when the breeze shifts. A woman spreads
a towel on the green lawn. She rolls up her shorts
and kicks off her sandals. I guess she's near Jack’s
age if he were here. Broader views contain more
bare shoulders and frisbees and trees, but the black
stone fills the same still space within me. You ask
me to say goodbye to Jack--an act of kindness--
a happiness project. I know your request is rhetorical.
Shadows track the listing earth day by day around
the sun. Jack is far away and moves as the sun
moves. If he could hear me would I say goodbye?

3.
My chair is occupied when I finally get here.
A neighborly lecture on street side parking
soured my sour mood. The lawn has browned.
The sun not the sculpture selects my new chair.
I seek relief in shadows from other people.
Blocked by a tree what does the Black Sun say
now? Last night I had two dreams. Jack is young.
We are on an ocean liner. Jack falls over the side;
I jump in after. In the other he wants to explore
dark and narrow steps leading underground. I fear
the dank cramped space--no room to turn and find
the sky. Don't go far, I say. I fear I won’t follow
when his fears awaken and I hear Papa? And towels!
To keep him clean! He wants five—I let him take three.
In my goddamn dream! The Black Sun is a ridiculous
metaphor for what it is like for years to lose your son.
It is cold and dead. Through its aperture, I can’t see
Jack's ashes on Hurricane Ridge. There is a reason
why mountains appear blue and blur in the distance.
Color disperses, contrast softens, background bleeds
through, and blue, blue light comes faster.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason. - Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture

We need a bigger Sun

We need a bigger Sun

That was still when wires were small,

I tell my absent son. Before the walls

were alive with things. The refrigerator

slept when yogurt was low. The displays

didn’t listen for your tongue’s double click.

The power lines grew thicker until no poles

could raise them. They lined the streets

like maples and in the plants turbines grew

feeding our need to communicate. Now

it takes all the energy of the sun to teleport

just one ounce of you within this universe

and avoid the windshield of a passing car.

Eau de Joy

Eau de Joy

My girlfriend picked roses from the landlord’s garden and put
them in a vase. The roses were mostly yellow; the petal tips,
fuscia. Stems were bent by lush ripe blooms. Some buds
hadn't opened. As she packed and boxed things up she moved
the vase until when I arrived it sat on top a bookcase under
a vent. That was nice. As the heater warmed the room, the roses’
fragrance displaced the smell of cardboard and dust from
normally out-of-sight places. The forced air stopped. And then
the noise of petals falling two or three at once from the most bent
bloom. In seconds the ruckus is over, and the silence starts this time
for real. Do roses die when she cuts them, or when the petals wilt
and drop? What if buds dry before they open? I've been told
my son Jack, yes he is dead but he lives on inside you, like a rose
inside Patou’s Eau de Joy, where I can’t hug or wrestle him.

I think I should speak

I cannot breathe.
I am swaddled in paper
dark in a box
with mummied glasses
and candlesticks.
I am not upset with you
stowing me here,
but you never smoked did you?
Why do you keep me?
I understand
your need to move.
Certainly the situation
is untenable
and the new place,
with her family,
well, that will be spectacular!
But they don’t smoke do they?
I’m not so pretty you’ll miss me.
Start with me.
Let go.
I’m easy. I never met Jack.

How I Save the Past?

I’m thinking about memory right now.  Different types of memory … maybe I rank the types from most vivid to least.  (I’m trying to depict in my memoir why there are some memories of Jack, I don’t want to recall, because I don’t want to lose them.)

1. A flashback.  Whatever the trigger, a smell, reading an email from 2006 for the first time, a photograph ... I’m transported straight back into the scene.  Almost like a waking dream, or perhaps, psychologically, a delusion.   Feels real.  I have the same emotions in the present that I had in the past.  No discontinuity.  They start where they left off.  Or maybe even new emotions now … that I was unwilling or unable to let myself experience in the past.  As if they were locked up waiting for a trigger to unlock them.
2. I’m walking down street on my way to coffee on Phinney Ridge and see a fence with slats.  I recall my dog Prince from my childhood.  I come home from school and find Prince smiling at me--his head stuck between horizontal slats in the fence.  He's dying of thirst, he tongue droops from his mouth, and he's happy to see me.  That memory is emotional, but I know I’m experiencing a memory.  I’m here, 53, in Seattle, revisiting a pleasant scene from my childhood.  I almost feel that hot, Gulf Coast sun on my face.  And the humidity.  Almost, but not really.  (It is also a social memory.  A boy and his dog.)
3. Type 3 is a kind of rehearsed memory.  It is familiar.  I return to it often and it has lost some of its emotional significance.  Diluted.  Maybe from my childhood, again, sitting on pink, ratty sprung couch watching Hogan’s Heroes with my dad in the den.  There were years of evenings like that … so my memory may not be a specific evening but a blend of many.  It feels indicative--a second or third layer removed from the actual event.
4. Unemotional memories … like my phone number.  Or maybe directions to the house I grew up in.  I could describe to you precisely how to get from the airport to my house in Nassau Bay.  But if I’m down there in Houston, and actually in a rental care driving the route, the memories become more vivid /emotional … a song comes on the radio from my high school days.  Then it is like memory 2 above. 

Memories types 1 & 2 surprise me, catch me off guard.  (Much coaching on vivid writing is about making the words surprise The Reader, and giving the words emotional weight.  I don't want to resort to tricks or gimmicks to surprise, but when I can find a way in the memoir to surprise, w/o the gimmick, then the memoir is better.)

So how do I save the past?  How do I preserve the freshness/immediacy of memories of Jack?  If each time I replay a memory, it loses significance.  I guess that’s a gift or skill actors have.  If they have to cry in a scene, there’s a memory they can draw on, and they can put themselves back in that emotional state.  Maybe they have the ability to infinitely re-imagine, recreate the scene … vs. remembering it.  How do I develop that ability?

Memory 1, the flashback, ironically I guess, is a symptom of PTSD, and those flashbacks are really really hard to get rid of.  Often they are violent.  So that durability makes me hopeful that I won't lose the flashback no matter how frequently it is triggered. I yearn for any flashback to Jack.  Even a traumatic one.

I worry, though, about fading and changing the memory and losing the connection to the past.  I believe that science posits that each time you recall a memory, you corrupt it a little with something from the present when it is returned to the memory banks.  (The present can be from your narrative self--other parts of the story you are telling yourself now about your past.)

But I might be conflating two things.  The trigger and the memory.  The object, for example the photograph that triggers the memory.  Maybe the photograph loses its impact as a trigger if you keep going back to it.  Maybe the memory is still there but you have to stumble upon a different, fresher object (memento, totem, talisman … ) to trigger it.

A rhetorical question.

And another, what past do I save?

Pawn

Pawn

I
A pawn of blond wood stained dark is easily stranded
in shadows of a book box kept by fear for last—
the shelves already full.  A pawn has one chance
to jump forward, claim the center, creating space
for others to attack or, sitting pretty, bait
a royal gambit.  In other end games the pawn
promoted, replaces the queen and mates.  It takes us
years to master his tears when every time I won.

II
Jack and I play over drinks—his orangina,
my red wine—awaiting mom and Libby.
His eyes on mine, I hold two pawns behind my back.
He taps the shoulder holding white.

III
Lit by windows facing dusk, a surgeon preps a
wound—extracting school work, baseball cards and useless
gamecube games.  Familiar fear shames me.  I clench
the board unfolding.  It is easy to sacrifice a pawn.
A Jeux Morize set includes a ninth white
because we can’t refinish a black pawn white.
I know what it takes to lose the missing piece.

IV
Love kills en passant.

V
Guilt stands alone
shame needs another.
One child dead
the other thriving.
It’s really too late now
to fix the broken clasp.
If we play again, they say,
it won’t be on this board.

inter

inter

at your plot
in trees above
the Gladstone tracks
the sun is your hat today
you never saw
your sister run
her rocking horse
a straw brimmed hat
trimmed in pink
grooms her hair
a braided strap
reins her regal chin
she wouldn’t know
Dale Evans, Trigger
in black and white
from my childhood
even then rerun
red dimpled rolls
of Kilgore caps
strings of Black Cat
firecrackers
not hers
not yours
what makes this plot sacred
will I bury your ashes here
without ceremony
without lily puddled ritual
before I leave
and carve god in caps in stone

Against the White Sox in Their First World Series

Against the White Sox in Their First World Series

Kali barks Mine! at the lazy, lolling spilling cardinal maple leaf.

            Jack smiled; hands rested on his knees.

Kali moves to and fro—Ensberg at third under an infield fly.  It’s blustery!

Jack already made a lot of plays.

Kali barks and yells it’s a glorious Indian Summer day!

His Astros T-shirt stuck to his shoulders.

Kali backs over the driveway curb almost stumbles into the dugout. She hopes

and doesn’t hope the shortstop calls her off.

Jack giggled.

The oak and the hickory give their leaves to the wind.  Kali spins beneath.  Take them!  Master they’re falling!

            Jack’s right sock spotted but not like Schilling’s.

Kali holds her focus on the lowest.  Then leaps, her haunches twist and bend, and she snaps as wind shears the ground; the leaf falls harmlessly foul.

Kali doesn’t shake her head, slump her shoulders, no tail between her legs.  Already, They’re falling!  Master!  For all the marbles!  Without a word of remorse.

Those powers ascribed to Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller—to Jack’s midnight blue Lab—are they false?  Craven?  Old wives’ tales?

Or does she go crazy too?  Her eyes flaming, her hair matted with blood. Small fangs protruding from purple lips; tongue lolling.

Without Urging

Without Urging
- after Jack Gilbert’s Music is the Memory of What Never Happened

Your best move this weekend was slipping your red
T-shirt over your head on the balcony
without my urging letting your whiteness
glimmer and drink in the bright autumn sun.
I was reading out loud from the poems you brought
and you rested your head on my pajama lap
eating rye toast and sliced apples with coffee.
I let the page edge cut into your breast
as my finger tapped out his rhythm over
and over again.  I grew bored, left you to study
and went in to salt the broth simmering.
From the kitchen sink window I checked
the perspective of young boys across the way.
Your knees propping up the economics text
blocked their view.  We had nothing to fear.
A little young yes for them to remember
the music they were missing, yet old enough
to begin to make out the first notes and like Jack
look for an instrument near by to play.

His Big House

His Big House

Jack’s friends lit candles.

Libby read Kindness.

I shook all the hands—

sustained embraces.

When the last guest was gone

she re-arranged the back room

imposing her order

over yours or her mother’s.

The furnace works long

to melt winter’s breath

drawn through a window

some summer cracked open.

As long as I have

this big house,

you have a place to stay

if you need one.

“Then I would hope you will keep that big house

so I have a place to stay when I need one.”

A silver frame cradles

a photo of Jack

climbing his tall sister

in Chenonceau’s garden.

The cold glass blurs

but I can’t polish it clean.

The tarnished loop and whorl

trace ridges like my own.

Dust collects under Jack’s bed.

I swapped his for yours

so others feel his support

and imprint his firm mattress.

I stopped resetting the clock

when the power comes on.

A green beacon beats

from your dark bedroom.

You can heal faster here,

not on your own,

and sound depths of your heart

worn brittle, riddled by grief.

My guests, you and I,

we understand much

too late.  Please don’t you

think that it’s time?

“What may I bring to make me feel welcome?

Cook us his favorite

after school snack.

“I will pan fry Jiaozi or hard boil an egg.”

Make sticky rice as well—

I share his sweet tooth.

Ode to a Pillow

Ode to a Pillow

You slept nights in 300 count cotton.
Maybe towards the end,
Denise shrouded you in 500.

Only today I noticed you missing.
In some police locker, obviously,
with the knife and GameCube.

I have to admit some jealousy.
You were the last to bruise his cheeks,
to taste vomit on his lips.

When you smothered his cries,
did you feel his tears soak through your slip
and stain you where you blinded him?

There was an instant, wasn’t there--
when he fought through the drugged sleep,
to feel his arms pinned between her legs?

You didn’t answer him, did you.
You thought you’d shelter him
from the precise nature of her betrayal.

I know you lay awake always
searching for his head to cushion—
to atone for his eternal rest.

If I can’t praise you, dear pillow,
if I don’t petition your release,
where will I find my place to sleep?