The crying and screaming, the defiance, the long silences and the long, recriminating letters on either side and in between the silent mail-order gifts of reconciliation.
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
____________
Contact
Bei
Dao
The Sunset at the End of the Block
I
ran out to see the sunset at the end of the block,
crimson
against a blackness over the freeway
as
though the whole county across the river
was
burning; I’m impelled to do this,
to
follow an energy field, exposed,
like
a mendicant roaming the naked earth.
For
instance, I’d want to gather
with
a crowd on some hill
to
watch the awful progression
of
a tidal wave:
First
the silent emptying,
the
scraping down of the tide, kelp and starfish
and
the shelves of seabeds lying shivering—
then
the unthinkable wall of water building, building.
The
tension of a recurring dream. In the dream
I’m
not afraid, just wondering
is
this how it is, is this the day I’m going to die?
Or
I’d want to watch a volcano come to life
in
rivulets of liquid fire
after
its top’s blown off, the pall
of
ashes afterward.
At
the end of the block the sun goes down
and
I see it is just a sunset, not a holocaust,
the
black clouds that just blew in from Mexico
rent
and shocked with blue.
So
I turn my back on it, and walk home.
Crickets
are chanting their evening prayers.
A
few drops of rain whisper
the
history of a monsoon.
___________________________________
Remembering My Mother
It
was July when my Mother died.
I
bought a house with the money she left me.
It
was such a sweet house, with yellow siding
and
climbing red roses, I wanted
to
call her up and say, "Ma,
come
look at the house I’ve got
with
your money!"
Wait a minute, I thought. She’s dead!
Why
is it that our relationships with our mothers
improve
so much after they’re dead?
I
wanted to call her up and say,
"What
was that all about?"
The
crying and screaming, the defiance,
the
long silences and the long,
recriminating
letters on either side
and
in between
the
silent mail-order gifts of reconciliation.
Sometimes
I just want to ring her up
and
ask her what it was she thought I said.
I’d
say, no, that’s not what I said at all
and
anyway, I’m sorry.
___________________________________
How I Know My Father in Objects
1.
A
paperweight on my desk, marbled stone
with
veins of white running through gray
reminds
me of my father, heavy egg, oh
how
can I say the color: Blue-gray. Slate-gray.
In
every document I’ve found of him, my father’s
eyes
are a different color, gray or hazel or brown.
There
must have been a time he was just a man
and
not a stone egg to be cracked.
Turned
and polished in a tumbler, to sit on my desk.
Balanced,
as it wouldn’t be in nature.
As
he never was, my cipher father, egg
of
a father, imagined father.
2.
Among
my mother’s things, I’ve found
my
father’s spoon, his initials and the year of his birth.
Tucked
in with it another spoon—
his
mother’s, I guess, from the initials.
Each
spoon with identical little dents in the bowl.
An
Aladdin’s lamp foats, it seems, on a lily pad
elaborate
in the handle, and other flowers, a silver
curtain
pulled back from the monogram.
and
rabbits, I think, and geese ...
it
is so hard to see ... it is so hard to see.
______________________________________________________________________