This is spring, too

We wake up to white flakes
on the windows, an absurdity of snow
on emerging leaves, grass-blades
vivid against the wet stuff still drifting down.
White-throated sparrows, knee-deep in it,
dip their striped heads to the ground.
Robins run on yellow feet, thrushes
with plumped-up feathers
peck for whatever they can find.
It's sure to melt tomorrow
but they've got to eat today.
We step out the door, fluffed up with sweaters
and jackets against the chill. Past the birds,
still busy. We're not looking for example or
allegory, just stumping off toward whatever's
just got to be done, snow or no snow.

Family Ties (a complete rewrite of Around the Bend from May 2)

Every day after school, I turned

on the TV with my brothers

Alex Keaton and Mike Seaver. We could

take anything that comes our way.

When the screen winked off,

nobody asked me

What you talkin’ ’bout?

or yelled Goodnight Ma

through open windows

while the porch lights hummed.

The first time you

brought me home to loud turkey

dinners, your brothers’ bad

puns, your sisters’ hugs, your mother

patting my behind,

the show went on and on,

and I cried for what was possible.

We leave with a sticker chart

Something’s wrong:
my kid is always angry!

When the ice cream slipped
off her cone, she threw her boot
at my head.

Beside me on the sofa,
the psychiatrist famous
for denying
anything is wrong.

I list the McDonald’s treats she won’t touch,
the kid she decked for not believing in fairies,
the fact that she won’t wear pants.

I reach for
my daughter
expecting her to scream.

But she’s too busy
sketching medieval weapons
today.


(I'm considering cutting this, and the companion I posted earlier, from the manuscript. Something still doesn't sit right with me.)

Adam Shtibel, Child Holocaust Survivor

our town became the ghetto, our own home our new prison
and before my father died of typhus
he and the neighbour built a hiding-closet

when the Gestapo came to round us up
- close enough i could hear them shouting, the bark
of their German Shepherd - i was twelve years old

and my mother told me to hurry and join my neighbour
in the closet, there was room enough only for two. the voices
became louder and i became not boy, neither man, but still dutiful son

and pushed her in, singing the lock home before running
to the square. i slipped away, and we all lived together
a while longer but eventually she and my older brother

were caught and died in Bergen-Belsen, became smoke and ash
as they say. i was caught stealing food and lied, said i was
a Polish Christian boy who had been orphaned, and they sent me

to a work-camp, where eventually a farmer took me home. even after
the war ended i never admitted who i was until one day another farmer
guessed. that farmer and his wife knew and protected me, i think perhaps

but in any case i went to the capital and was given schooling and money
and became a fighter pilot for Poland at the age of 17. i met my wife
quite by accident when i wrote the address of a friend down wrong and

she showed me around her city. she and another child and eight adults
had spent two years in a small hole dug in a barn floor. we have been
very happy together. i only wish my mother might have stayed hidden.

The Barrens, part i

In the barrens

Nothing grows

But silence

Roots can't find

Their way

Through crusted earth,

Skin so thinned

It's thick with armour -

Invisible, impassable coat.

Quiet, desolate,

The Arctic tundra;

Dangerous, yet

Beautifully barren.

The imaginative child says goodbye

A broken
   pink plastic
      shovel rests
         beside the fresh
            hole in the heavy
               clay that once separated
            you from the shoebox
         where your bunny         
      lies curled
   on his side
like a comma.

Shoreline

On our annual father-daughter beach walk
we pass through a minefield of seashells,
the remains of a crab creature from outer space,
a pufferfish huffing its last puff,
an uprooted tree returned to the land
after an ocean journey left her
varnished, bruised, choked by sea moss.
We dodge unnerving clumps of bubbles
left behind by water
tourists like me believe is clean enough to swim in.

On the way back
we watch the sun fall,
and the tide relentlessly
invade a sand city,
with its bucket-shaped battlements
and conscientiously-scooped moats,
now proven useless to the watery onslaught.

Resolute waves blur the boundaries
a small human tried to create
between the built world and nature,
bundled home before she could learn
her first hard lesson
of impermanence and vulnerability
out here on the cold wet sand.

MIA

forehead pressed against car window
the night sky spelled words I couldn't yet read
shooting stars warning how fast it would all pass
one blurred yellow highway line, one "quick make a wish" at a time

as suns burnt out like sparklers a million light-years away
and meteors evaporated in the atmosphere, unanswered questions
skipping stones in that black pond above
I imagined what it would be like to watch the night sky with an imagined you

someone who could decode the constellations and tell me the stories
I had to tell myself to dream back what was lost
scattered stars pulsing distant light
thin-stretching skin of the universe holding us in its pores

I look for you still, alone, and
starfucked by a galaxy of ticks at the end of this spring day
I tweeze them off pitiless, find you in the obscured crescent moon, in the magnificence
of drowned dragonflies, undancing on twigs in a star-shot summer

Prophet Elijah

eagle feather aloft

after too many years hurtling down the tracks

you found brakes for that Great White Train


remember that this land belongs to itself

and we all live upon it, but some of us

have been here a millenia longer


and object to this

S.S. colonial enterprise

twelve days you held that feather


many days longer than Moses

and nobody to prop your arms

just what floated that eagle


prayers

rising

upwards

Tears in heaven

for E.

One week of a mother’s fingers pressed 

to warm glass. A single moment
eye to eye.

Aspirated meconium sounds almost  

musical, as if with his first breath
he shook a sky of brass.

The morning she leaves
with empty hands, the oaks weep
themselves dry in her hair.