Candles
If on your grandmother’s birthday you burn a candle
To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra
To honor the memory of someone who never met her,
A man who may have come to the town she lived in
Looking for…
Christmas, 1970
We assemble the silver tree,
our translated lives,
its luminous branches,
numbered to fit into its body.
place its metallic roots
to decorate our first Christmas.
Mother finds herself
opening, closing the Red Cross box
she will carry into 1976
like an unwanted door prize,
a timepiece, a stubborn fact,
an…
“Find Work”
My mother’s mother, widowed very young
of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit,
moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue
and country heart anaesthetized and mute
with labor. So her kind was taught to do—
“Find work,” she would reply to…
genetics
My mother has a gap between
her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar.
Each child in this family has the same space
connecting us.
Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust.
His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop
people on the street.
Whose angel…
Grandfather
In 1915 my grandfather’s
neighbors surrounded his house
near the dayline he ran
on the Hudson
in Catskill, NY
and thought they’d burn
his family out
in a movie they’d just seen
and be rid of his kind:
the death of a lone black
family is the Birth
of a Nation,
or…
In Exchange for My Absence
Abuelo holds the end of a broom halfway bent
over the pila, tries to scrub clean places in the walls
he can no longer reach. I climb into the water-basin,
in the pila’s dark corners hides an algae-eating fish,
in order to begin I…
Lineage
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet…
On An Unsociable Family
O what a strange parcel of creatures are we,
Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree;
We all are alone, though at home altogether,
Except to the fire constrained by the weather;
Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all…
Prints
Seeing photos
of ancestors
a century past
is like looking
at your own
fingerprints—
circles
and lines
you can't
recognize
until someone else
with a stranger's eye
looks close and says
that's you.
Reflections on History in Missouri
This old house lodges no ghosts!
Those swaggering specters who found their way
Across the Atlantic
Were left behind
With their old European grudges
In the farmhouses of New England
And Pennsylvania
Like so much jettisoned baggage
Too heavy
To lug over the Piedmont.
The flatlands are inhospitable
To phantoms. Here
Shadows…
Snowmen
My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath
arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.
This heirloom,
his skeleton under my…
Walking with My Delaware Grandfather
Walking home I feel a presence following
and realize he is always there
that Native man with coal-black-hair who is
my grandfather. In my first memories
he is present, mostly wordless,
resident in the house where I was born.
My mother shows him…
the world is about to end and my grandparents are in love
still, living like they orbit one another,
my grandfather, the planet, & grandma, his moon assigned
by some gravitational pull. they have loved long enough
for a working man to retire. grandma says she’s not tired,
she…