Dust or Fire Read online

His father never the same

  The neighbour’s hired hand

  dead soon after war’s end

  Mole-Sick

  Sjen foar eagen is gjin gûchelspul.

  in our family’s underground world

  the tunnelling began early

  detecting by feel not ask

  vestigial eyes tentacle-like nose

  forage under grassy skin

  an “eye doctor” treats

  our uncle’s surfeit

  visions and voices

  we assail each other

  home the anxious nest

  summer and winter

  treading soil treading sediment bottoms

  of ponds and streams hidden

  in cedar swamplands

  sharp quick nerve for our prey

  elusive grey pelt

  rudimentary eye

  seeing is no conjurer’s game

  our father’s months of paranoia

  a “sunstroke”

  death fingering him daily

  full chorus singing non-stop insults in all keys

  heart doing double time

  hands idle

  burrowing

  into borrowed

  sensation

  we tunnel around each other

  Three Old Frisian Sisters

  In healjier is net oan de stôk bûn.

  i. Siem

  Wheeled into the garden, her dementia cuts corners.

  “I am that ruined house.”

  Roll up the table carpet.

  Dense pile swallows dishes, ornaments.

  Viscous red on brown, liquid column of white —

  we’re stranded here — wedged into a mutely staring supper.

  Coffee grinders hole-punch a patina sky.

  Just try tying a year to a stake.

  Llamas and goats graze a circumference.

  Strolling shrubs, roosters and hens.

  Hedges list toward sea-battened windows.

  Turn down turn down the volume on the ocean floor.

  ii. Tjits

  Time, you old shuffler, where’s the ambler gone?

  The body’s casualties pile up.

  TV anchors converse in the living room.

  Evening strollers wander through the hall.

  Tick-burr heart and sugar-steeped blood

  too much psychic traffic on twisted feet.

  Children, come to her lonely supper.

  Red plastic chairs, beaming metal legs await.

  Her muffin orphaned between ordering and arrival.

  A year cannot be bound to a stake.

  Feet distress the stairs.

  These young strangers — why are they here?

  iii. Jacoba

  Rain slicks the hair when she lives in a downpour.

  War in the windows again.

  Torso juts out of the wood fire.

  A tarp once covered legs imperfectly, nothing to hide.

  Day leapfrogs night, gnaws on sleepfolds.

  Orange ghosts rib the cactus plant.

  Knots will slip from a year tied to a stake.

  An anxious button nictitates.

  Orotund voices scatter words off a shelf.

  Memory pills ransack flesh —

  nausea, crimping muscle, fatigue, oh anorexia.

  Wind carts her hydrangea hair into strangers’ gardens.

  What is the sky thinking?

  The snapper swan commingles with Leda again.

  What are we humans doing below?

  The Ones You Believe

  Alle geasten moat men net leauwe.

  don’t believe all spirits

  just the ones

  whose white hot teeth

  afflict your spine

  so you cannot

  sit stand run

  you burn cold

  trying to find

  love’s temperature

  The Visit

  Kom ik by dy, ús Heare God sil net by dy komme.

  The crow flies

  at the passenger side

  of the car, braking

  tail and accelerating wings.

  Other crows carve rough

  openings in a sky turned

  on the horizon

  like a screw-top lid.

  My bestemming, my father.

  Bestemmen, to intend.

  My will says no my flesh says yes.

  *

  Family voices begin to ride

  my roller-coaster spine

  through one- and two-stoplight towns.

  Internally exposed to the elements —

  his house —

  my liver revolts.

  I may visit you, but I’m not God.

  *

  We drive further north

  to the Mennonite for eggs, and after

  visit my old catechism teacher. Chess pieces

  at the table, we hear his story

  of depression and its shame dogs.

  My father shrunk

  in a chair looks at fly specks

  on the window.

  Almost inaudible —

  the soul’s creaking.

  *

  The prophet tells King David,

  lately returned from Bathsheba mourning

  her husband just killed on front lines:

  A rich man, his backyard filled with sheep,

  takes a poor man’s only lamb.

  Like a daughter, it used to lie in his bosom,

  drink from his cup. Faced with David’s rage,

  the prophet says,

  You are the man.

  *

  What insular theft

  turned my father thief?

  Who taught him to see life

  as a God-slot where sin

  must be paid and paid?

  *

  Bending

  to my side of the car, one last lesson —

  you’ve got to forgive — did my catechism

  teacher say this?

  *

  The beeping fire alarm doesn’t need batteries.

  Light a match under —

  it shrieks.

  Looks

  Sy sjocht as in brette ûle yn de tange.

  Those looks that can’t be classified.

  No typology, no phases of the moon

  can explain them.

  A look that travels through the circus rings

  of scalp and shoulders and triangle

  of trapezius, that crinks the bowel,

  that has the rider adrenal

  gland kicking the kidney.

  The look of an owl

  roasting in the tongs.

  A look Rembrandt in the Frick flings you,

  self-portraiture a criss-cross of straining lines

  in beefeater and fur and red sash and ochre,

  face framing the livid cave of his eyes.

  On Not Dying

  In minske kin de waarme siel net behâlde.

  There is no such thing as dying

  Augustine says in City of God

  puzzling where living becomes dying.

  When you are still living you are not

  dying but living until the moment

  you are dead

  and then you are not dying either

  but dead.

  He wondered too about the sundering

  of body and soul formed in such intimacy

  that the two are pulled apart

  anguish grating

  violin strings of the flesh

  every bit of light and slices of dark.

  The impossibility

  of holding onto the warm soul.

  Eulogy

  Lit de dief eat oer, de brân lit neat oer.

  I often felt

  turpentine hatred

  cut with liquid horror.

  A hidden love distilled.

  I often wished

  he lay dead before me

  and now

  antiseptically he does.

  I rehearse
a eulogy

  for a theft and a fire.

  The thief leaves something

  but the fire leaves nothing.

  Leeuwarden Train Station

  Leeuwarden Train Station

  Six years after my mother’s death, I ask my father about their first meeting.

  Treeless gaunt, pleated into dirt-filled crevices, in one part of the story his eyes and voice sent a flare across the table: she caught me, she grabbed hold of me — words the word “hug” cannot translate.

  She answered his ad in the newspaper: correspondent wanted by soldier, homesick, military service in Indonesia.

  They met at the train station because she couldn’t bring anyone to the house. Her twenty-three-year-old sister had just died.

  How her parents trusted him to take her to Canada.

  She grabbed hold of him, and he would never let her go.

  When we were very small, he would carry us under his arms like canvas rolls to the front stoop, along planks lined up over a muddy yard. For many more years, he would grab hold of us when the devil had a pitchfork up his ass.

  When I visit him, his greetings are concise: oh, it’s you.

  In more expansive moods, his greetings touch upon clothes: he recalled that his mother always referred to people wearing shorts as white sticks; he asked, do you know what a man said to a soldier? You can fill your boots with poop.

  His hammer, his children the nails.

  My father walks with two canes, head down, grimy yellow cap a hungry beak pecking at the sidewalk. I open the car door, will close it when he is inside, will drive him anywhere he wants to go, will sit for hours in his kitchen until the light falls gray, but I do not touch him.

  His helplessness attracted your mother. She was a martyr, my aunt said.

  In my mother’s grief fog, was the stranger she held on a terminating or a through platform?

  If I can believe a star chart made by a Vietnamese Buddhist I met at a gym (he was accurate on other points) then one of my parents was sex-obsessed.

  If my brother remembers this accurately, he found a flat package under the mat in the car while waiting for our father in the laundromat. It was quickly snatched from his hand when he waved the shiny square in the sun falling on the churning machines.

  Was it delectable, the child’s bum he spanked red? A show, his gestures clown large, folderol laughter, I was the audience or in the ring, pants and underpants pulled down, teeter tottering across his lap. A circus for the very young.

  How edible, children at any age. Still the child at any age.

  The marriage pledge held my mother.

  My father made solitary day trips to farmers’ trade shows, returning late at night.

  She grabbed hold of him, skirted by love she didn’t feel for other suitors.

  Only death did part them.

  He bought three plots in the cemetery because he didn’t want anyone near her.

  When I was twenty-two, my uncle drove me to Amsterdam and said goodbye outside the train station. His hands cupped my face; he looked intently at me — the gesture seemed important so I remembered it, but I felt outside its meaning.

  My uncle’s only daughter, born three months and ten days after me, lived five years and 271 days.

  My cousin sometimes fell down in the hall just after she got out of bed. And then the Hong Kong flu.

  That same winter, a girl in my kindergarten class died. I saw the empty box where her things used to be stored. My mother saw me as the next fish to be caught on the fishing line, and ever after I ate with her sharpened knife and fork.

  Living with those two ageless five-year-olds fills my tracks in snow.

  For years, I feared that reaching look of my aunt and uncle.

  In the hall of my apartment, my uncle reached out and kissed me on the lips, my body folding in awkward angles away from him. My aunt cut in sharply, Zij kan daar niet tegen — you’re upsetting her.

  Waiting on the station platform, the proximity of wheeling life and the still life.

  Not the life my mother wanted, but she had days of the sun falling on her just so.

  Not the father I wanted, but the one my mother greeted at the station and followed to Canada.

  Just once I visited my cousin’s grave, my uncle silent, walking ahead of us, my aunt talking — the many children who died that week, the doctor who said he would quit if one more child died — my uncle walking ahead in silence.

  I could not venture any children into the world.

  After a week away, in the hall with a suitcase, my cat greets me with a trill; I hold her close and kiss her. I do not do this instinctively with family.

  My mother greeted him, and clasped him tight, the moment that decided him.

  I find my father, in a red-checkered jacket and baseball cap, seated alone, in the back pew at the wedding. To my question, do you want to move closer to the front? he replies, are you ashamed to sit with me?

  Is there any appetite so green as a child for a parent and so furious when the eyes of the room stare back empty?

  There are so many moments before and after any photographic record when something in the flesh clicks open an aperture. My uncle and I sit on the black leather sofa looking at photos, a final act before the train station. When I close the small album, he turns to me and touches my face as if he could trace the ravenous child in the grown woman. As if the serviceable wings of a bee became a blur.

  When my father thinks my visit is coming to an end, he turns to the pine trees bordering the lane and thanks me.

  When my visit has really come to an end, he sits slumped in a chair by the wood stove. I walk across the gravelled vacant lot of my father. With store and gas pumps gone, no one plans to build.

  My uncle cannot leave my aunt for very long — she may wander out into the street. From the train station, in too little time, the Atlantic between us again.

  Only forest, fields, highways, lakes, towns and cities separate me and my father.

  My father cannot let my mother go around the corner into her death.

  About to drive into the glacial valley locals call the Hell Hills, my father asks — did Mama and I take good care of all of you? — a pause and then I say — yes?

  Mid-afternoon traffic, sun glancing indifferently off metal and glass, my uncle tells me that they’ve had a Beetle and a Soviet car called the Ugly Duckling, small talk of departure right up to the automatic doors of the station.

  As light fell in pearls, my mother held him, a stranger.

  After my uncle’s farewell, I watch from inside the station doors. I realize he’s been sitting in his car a long time when he finally backs up and turns into the empty amphitheatre of the afternoon.

  The train will leave on time.

  I might walk through that meeting place, on my way to the train, where my mother held a stranger.

  Still Life, Animal

  Still Life: Reprise

  Reclining on plush drapery

  the house a virgin, white trim

  languorous green grapes

  on a blue habit. Rarely seen

  blinking pomegranate winter seeds

  in public now, almost a visitation.

  Lightly furred kiwi, arcing cherry stems.

  Down the dark hall of the window

  dazzling on a royal apple, a fly,

  pleated light on a wall. Unseen

  irreligious wings. A decanter,

  table holds a clear eddy,

  eyeless eyes burst open manifold

  and, above, revolving red wheels

  lintels in the splinter of the moment.

  Bloom.

  Berlinale Erotik

  Berlin Film Festival

  i.

  How did you find that film?

  My body liked it.

  ii.

  Day into night and night into day

  revolutions repeated too quickly

  for the eyes and the ankles,

  theatre to theatre, fi
lm to film.

  The dark outside

  spinning spits of illumination,

  a fast city on its way.

  Airy golden mistletoe

  orbiting street lights —

  only the constellations along the aisles

  not turning.

  iii.

  A Lego giraffe, two stories

  of yellow and brown blocks

  on the sidewalk near

  curved walls of blue glass.

  Its neck the length of an escalator.

  iv.

  Neon bracelets mark the Canadians

  at the Canadian Embassy party.

  We seem to be designated the ambassador’s

  friends — no one knows him in his own embassy

  he says and tells us stories about George W. Bush.

  In the small talk next to my friend’s silvery brightness,

  I emit a few sombre pulses. The ambassador

  holds her hand a long while when saying goodbye.

  v.

  Meryl Streep receives an honorary Golden Bear,

  thanking all the husbands and boyfriends

  who accompanied their partners

  to her films. She’s not wearing stilettos;

  her tall heels could walk across a lawn

  without flinging her backwards.

  She makes casual adjustments to her bust

  as her Mrs. Thatcher does in The Iron Lady

  and acknowledges that she gets all the glory

  instead of directors and makeup artists.

  The downside — in art galleries

  people stare at her and ignore the paintings.

  vi.

  At the Gemäldegalerie I study Cranach’s

  Last Judgment triptych with another

  anonymous patron. We find devils

  horseshoeing people,

  note the frequent body piercing

  (a stake through the chest, a spear

  through the back), a stove combusting

  sinners, spiky creatures

  in cartwheeling hells, green

  the colour of monstrosity.

  The scene that began it all, the left panel,

  a high-altitude battle of insects,

  black and white angels,

  and down below, in a tree,

  a mermaid serpent with breast implants

  gives an apple to a feckless girl and boy.

  vii.

  Berlin’s Erstes Erotik Labyrinth,

  a darkened storefront