No Ordinary Place (5 page)

No more than ten he was, a Roman face,

dark curls in arpeggios descending his neck,

feet bare, trousers torn. Where he learned

to play that tango — love crashing into grief,

sweat into hunger — was anyone’s guess. A traffic

light changed colour; the people darted across

like startled birds. And there in Avenida, Florida,

a couple began to dance. Down the block,

a woman dressed in white — white face, white gloves,

a human statue, turned her stone eyes toward

the boy. First her hands slumped, then her arms;

in her, some knowing opened like a rose.

And weeds bursting the tiles at their feet

grew beautiful in the Argentina heat.

All my nights have been one night,

all my moons, one moon.

The wind sings its one

eternal song

over all the world’s days and nights.

I pack this suitcase with words,

phrases folded, neatly pressed,

send them into the light

and darkness of the world

that they may live their own lives.

In them, my prayer is answered,

that my father live forever,

and it is the owl instead

who calls to the night,

it is the gull who crosses the sea;

it is the blossom whose petals turn frail

as an ancient letter

in the slow breath of sleep.

Here I place his palms to mine;

I lift the page to his ear

 
so that the moon

will sing of its cold love,

and all days are but the blue

arc of a single day,

and no one is lonely, and no one

is a rain-darkened road

leading out of sight.

Why is my father standing

 
in the apple tree,

feet splayed from branch to branch?

 
Why this temptation

of my father to carry his seventy-one years

into the branches of this tree

and point his clippers at the sky

as if he could snip a piece

 
of that blue cloth,

carry it into the house

and spread it over his bed?

Would it turn to darkness and stars

 
as he slept?

I stand below, watching him,

 
arms over his head,

shrouded in apple blossoms

cheery and wingy as angels,

and see him look skyward, past

the spring shoots racing

 
heavenward,

and I want to
be
gravity, pull my father

 
back to earth,

look him in the eyes with my grave face,

a little god taking him to task.

I want his feet on damp ground,

 
my arms holding him tighter

than this tree which cannot fathom

 
the word
daughter
.

It makes me afraid,

on this day of blooming possibilities

to see him stretching,

 
seeming so intent

 
upon heaven.

I want to take away my father's grief.

I want to unravel the thread of it

from his shirts. I want to scrub

the dirt-black seams of it

from his fingernails.

I want to sweep it

from the doorways of his house,

wash it from the walls and hinges

 
and window wells.

I want to capture the moth of his guilt

that has crawled inside his ear

and whispers its dusty word,

the shudder of its wings

 
sibilant as shame.

I want to reach in and take it in my fist.

I want to quiet the river of sorrow

that gurgles its weary dirge

beneath his bed, his kitchen table.

 
I will ask the willow

to quit her weeping.

I will point toward the sky, say,

See the moon ripening
 — 
there
 —

 
in your branches.

Be now content
.

I will call the little birds

to bring the lilt of their gossip

into the yard.

 
I will call the crows

to carry the bonehouse of his sadness

in their beaks, open their wild

 
blue-black wings

and drop it into the sea.

I will place the stones of the dead

beside the back fence

and I will sing them to sleep.

 
It is enough now
,

I will sing.
Enough
.

Go to sleep, you dead.

Leave my father to his life.

I will plant a tree whose blossoms

will burst and scatter

over the wet

 
black earth,

and I will call each petal in turn

joy, light, peace
,

until I have named them all,

until my father's grief is consumed

 
as though by fire,

and I will strew the ash of it

over the sea.

My shoes, blind boats,

this Braille road vanishing.

Out in the storm, pink petals,

sudden birds.

That horse in high grass

a whale in a green sea.

Hummingbird at the feeder,

its quick tongue vanishing.

I light one candle,

another in the window glass.

My prayer multiplying.

I am filling with light.

You had your watching face on,

my shyness vanishing.

I take your radio,

the one you found as a boy —

dials intact,

 
no sound —

set it on an apple crate

in a corner of my mind.

Turning the volume full,

I hear the minute hammering

of a spider

 
framing her web,

a mole shifting its whiskers

in the blind reaches

of its den.

A field mouse slips out

from beneath the cat’s claws:

I catch the rustle

 
of its escape,

the startled

wing dust of moths,

 
and higher,

an owl’s shifting eyes —

two black moons.

Horse Head Nebula

paws the deep

 
ground of space

that hums its far,

unfathomable music.

Beyond your window downy birds

huddle on branches

complex as the lines in your face

 
as you sleep,

the boy in you sleeping too,

who listened at night,

 
dials turned high,

worlds and seas pooling

 
in the shell of his ear,

riding the tide of dream.

I watched him swing the axe in the sun,

split wood into fine and finer pieces,

the leaves like gold coins scattered at his feet,

his hair silvered, shining, a bright thing

that would catch a crow’s eye, or a daughter’s,

who had searched all her life for him. Raising

his arms over his head, swift he brought them

down, and the wood crackled and startled into air

like birds in sudden flight. Watching,

I learned the strength of him;

it frightened me, too, the power of him

who could make the quiet wood fly,

who could gather the flown and fallen wings

and turn them into flame.

Now light pulls away from both edges

of the day, from windows, from open doors.

Soon, my father at the edge of his years

will feed the birds from his open hand,

his greying hair the colour of juncos,

and they will come — with their stripes and crests,

their wing bands, their bright breasts,

to alight on his shoulder, his finger,

quicken the midnights of their eyes and learn

the starry stillness of his song. As light

grows old, leaves flare and die, he grows young.

Could I become a titmouse, timid wren,

he’d purse his lips in a kiss for me,

magician to the small, the wingèd ones.

Luck is this road trip I take with my father,

the wheels of his car

 
rumbling
hallelujah

over the pock-marked asphalt.

Luck is rain pitting the windshield,

 
holy water of our pilgrimage.

I curl the fingers of one hand

around the smooth stone of joy.

The dashboard clock doesn’t work.

 
Time has stopped,

but joy lies content and warm

 
in my palm,

while my father’s brother, father, mother

fall from heaven

 
to crowd the back seat

and point to everything that’s new

 
since they left the earth.

I send us south: left here, right, left,

and we arrive at my old house,

get out of the car, peer through the window

 
to a child’s room — mine —

but the child I was isn’t there;

 
she’s looking down on us

from the broad branches of the mimosa,

dropping threads of mimosa blossom

 
on our heads.

“Here he is,” I say, “
him
 —

the one you’re looking for up there.”

My father’s parents lean on the car,

wave their hands at the heat,

 
his brother

off having a smoke,

and when he crushes the butt

 
under his heel,

we clamber in and drive on.

I ask questions that have no human answers:

 
What is the map of grace?

Who is grief’s daughter?

Is hope a bird with blue flame for wings?

 
Is the sky its mother?

We drive north to my father’s house.

 
I want to see the boy he was

slip out the window and down the drain pipe,

the aroma in that bakery window just too much

for brothers already etching their bodies

 
with hieroglyphs of regret.

At the church, we check in on the musty pews,

 
the astringent sun pouring

through Jesus’ startled hands.

The bent-backed, hound-jowled preacher

 
opens a book, announces,

 
Blessed are the travellers,

for theirs is the crumbling road,

 
the blooming weeds,

 
the starry shards of glass,

theirs the dust of the past

 
and the mud of the present

clinging to their shoes.

We drive on into the night,

 
all of us pointing at stars,

when his father, mother, his brother rise

each to a constellation

 
of shattered light.

For an instant I see my father

in a time to come, rise too,

 
but his hands still hold to the compass

 
of the steering wheel

where he turns the four directions

of loneliness and desire, hunger and grief,

 
that tie us to this heaven,

hold us to the earth.