Family & Ancestors

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise
I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood
and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River.
Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs.
The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits
of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack
needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip
and blow vowels of fire through the living room,
the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs.
I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window

Everything was the apple and the glass of tea.
The mountain, the mold, the apron on the grandmother —
the neck of a brown baby holding its tiny head
to get rid of the black bees.
This is the end of a bad century,
the opening of a door that was never built into the chest.

I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me
for being a straight line toward the dead
who were buried with their poor clothes
in the Arizona desert of iron borders.

This way of waving to the embers of the past,
not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside
my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized
insects whose dry husks I kept since a child.

“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.”
— Dionisio Martinez

for Larry Villanueva

In which everything goes backwards
in time and motion
Palm trees shrink back into the ground
Mangos become seeds
and reappear in the eyes of Indian
women
The years go back
cement becomes wood
Panama hats are seen upon skeletons
walking the plazas
Of once again wooden benches
The past starts to happen again
I see Columbus’ s three boats
going backwards on the sea
Getting smaller
Crossing the Atlantic back to the

I have been cherish’ d and forgiven
By many tender-hearted,
’ Twas for the sake of one in Heaven
Of him that is departed.

Because I bear my Father’ s name
I am not quite despised,
My little legacy of fame
I’ ve not yet realized.

I listened to them talking, talking,
That tableful of keen and clever folk,
Sputtering... followed by a pale and balking
Sort of flash whenever some one spoke;
Like musty fireworks or a pointless joke,
Followed by a pointless, musty laughter. Then
Without a pause, the sputtering once again...
The air was thick with epigrams and smoke;
And underneath it all
It seemed that furtive things began to crawl,
Hissing and striking in the dark,
Aiming at no particular mark,
And careless whom they hurt.

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings
turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.
We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak
in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,
from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters
will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets
burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery

with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew

whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how

she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were

my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac

When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field,
It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness
That my mother could not console herself to the waste
And insisted on having it picked over with human hands,

Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets
And the hands had long since gone into the factories.
No matter how often my father pointed this out,
She worried it the way I’ ve worried the extra words