Forgetting

Tags

Albuquerque, birds, New Mexico, poetry, sexual abuse, trees

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1952

The back of the garage, dim, dusty,
was my father’s makeshift workshop,
a table set between the lawnmower
and the rakes, hoes, pitchfork.
One fall afternoon when I was seven,
I found him there, wearing
his gray and maroon wool jacket,
repairing a lamp. I told him
if he didn’t stop doing those things
to me, I would tell my mother;
he looked at the ax on the wall,
said I’d better not.

Back out in the sunshine slanting
down on our peach trees, next door
the apple orchard, last of the fruit
picked over by birds, I forgot
for forty years the things he’d done
and went on doing. In the garden
the chrysanthemums, ruined by frost,
had been cut to the ground.

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Ice Cream for Everyone

Tags

Albuquerque, death, dreams, emotions, ice cream, Love, New Mexico

California and Utah, 2009
Photo: Albuquerque, NM, 1948 or 49,
me on far left, Lynelle on far right

My cousin Lynelle was dying,
I heard; remembering when we were children,
her big green eyes, smile sweet,
a bit crooked from a bad delivery,
five years older, so kind
to three-year-old me I thought
she was an angel;
that night I visited her in a dream,
in her hospital room in Utah,
kissed her cheek, told her I loved her;

standing all around, next to the walls,
my mother, Lynelle’s parents,
our grandmother,
Aunt Zulema and Auntie Irene,
all departed years before,
there to welcome, console, help,
I didn’t know which;

later on, Lynelle’s daughter wrote me
that the next day her mother was fading
in and out, but one time
she opened her eyes,
gestured at the empty room,
and told her daughter, as though the time
had come for the highlight of the picnic,
“Get ice cream for everyone!”

The Cowboy Life

Tags

cousins, cowboy, Montana, poetry, ranch

Montana, 1958, California, 2014

Windy sky blew a memory my way,
long ago family visit to Montana:
horseback riding with my ten-year-old cousin
Tony, born cowboy, rounding up strayed cattle;
long green grass, narrow streams
swimming with fish, huge sky overhead.

Afterward, back to my aunt and uncle’s home;
my aunt cooking supper
for family and ranch hands;
my uncle, foreman of the ranch, with stories
of life on the range; family one short:
Tony’s much older brother,
not cut out for cowboy life,
already off to the city.

Never saw them again; in my mind,
they are still in Montana that day
of glorious summer,
even though snow fell
two weeks later, and some years after,
they moved to a ranch in Nevada.
Long gone, my aunt and uncle,
none of my cousins know where Tony
is; I hope beneath a wide blue sky.

Visit from the Zooks

Tags

death, dreams, Los Angeles, poetry

Washington. DC, 1945, Los Angeles, CA, 1958
Alameda, CA, 2014

Their clothing, exuberant Technicolor
reds and greens and yellows,
mother, father, three children
boarding a streetcar in San Francisco,
old friends of my parents,
unseen for fifty years
until this dream.
Smiling, laughing, they wave and call to us:
my parents, long-dead, my sister, and me,
all young.

Guilt caught my heart, stopped my breath,
when I heard, age twelve, that their first,
a daughter my age, had died in her crib,
while I had lived. Two more came to them;
the first left behind.

We moved to L. A. that year,
visited them; not a swimmer,
I stood in their small, tree-shadowed
pool and wondered,
unhappy thought of the unloved,
if they hated me for breathing.

But there she was last night,
tartan skirt, red sweater,
taller than the other two,
caught up at last.

Family Dinner

Tags

Albuquerque, childhood, family, father, poetry

Albuquerque, NM, 1950’s

My family’s dinner table precarious
on top of a mountain,
my father talking at length
about lesser beings below:

angry people yelling,
driving fast;

misbehaving children,
not doing homework;

lowlife teens gone bad, drinking,
hot rods, tattoos;

Beatniks in black turtlenecks,
spouting poetry, pretending
to be nonconformists
while conforming to each other.

The table so high, air so thin,
it was hard to breathe.

The Day I Discovered Happiness

Tags

Albuquerque, apple orchard, Easter, emotions, Love, New Mexico, poetry, trees

Albuquerque, New Mexico 1954

On Easter Sunday when I was nine,
I was ready for church
before the others and I went out
to the side yard, still in shade,
where the purple iris bloomed.
Beyond the wire fence,
the sun shone on the apple orchard
in the next yard: old, knobbly little trees
with few leaves, in the fall, fewer apples.
I loved those trees with a fierce love,
and that day, gazing at them,
I was filled with light and lightness,
I was shining, floating,
who knew which; for once
the real thing, pure, unmixed
with sorrow or guilt or fear:
happiness.

Sunrise

Tags

1951, Albuquerque, birds, Ford, Jung, Kaiser, Native American, New Mexico, poetry, sunrise

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1951

These days the birds start singing
before dawn, calling up the sun,
like the Native American tribe
that performed a ritual
every day to help
their Father the sun
come up over the horizon.

I remember the car
my family had, a 1947 Kaiser,
a huge, gray, overturned boat
of a car, with a back seat big
as a bed, and I remember
the sorrow I felt
when my father sold it
and bought the little maroon Ford,
which I hated for not being
the Kaiser; my life was such
that every loss
made my world smaller
and darker, made me feel
like the sun never would
come up again.

Choir Practice

Sunday morning sermons,
about the souls of the damned burning
in the lake of fire, seemed to a child
like the deeper truth
that made the sunshine streaming
through the tall windows a lie.
 
But Tuesday evenings brought the truth
I still live by; my mother put her coat
onto a pew and I lay down in the dark;
the only light in the church shone
on the choir. As they practiced,
their harmonies, like woven strands of love,
rose gently into the vastness of the night.

First Birthday

In a photo, thin, solemn, wide-eyed,
I sit in a high chair
in the back yard
of the little house with the red roof,
a cake with one candle
in front of me.

Afterward, put down for my nap,
wordless happiness,
life had changed:
balloons, presents, cake,
not the other.

When I woke up,
my father came in.
Nothing had changed.