avis, of dignity

i'm calling you from across the
waves of endless hours that have
rolled upon our mutual
seas

calling back farther than
my beginnings on this earth, farther
still than the beginnings of your
children

back to the place you were when
the picture was taken that i've stolen
from my mother's cache that she keeps in her
closet

a picture in dwindling black and
white and lashed with the
patina of history and
time

i call back to that perfect you
frozen in the frame, a face with a
thousand long views toward me
here

and ask that we sit face to face
in some pastel landscape
that is nearly too sweet to
taste

beneath a tree on a slope
of green land that lapses
into the bosom of the Atlantic
ocean

with a noble breeze carrying
the midsummer fragrances on her flows:
briny salt and ripe grass and honeyed
wildflower

this is where i dream you
were before you were my
grandmother and were just
avis

this certain specimen of
history: a woman in youth, handsomely
alive in her country's leanest
years

before the world out there
beyond your slim fingers
and taut face went to
war

i call out to you in that
dreamy blur of a place i've
invented and ask you to not
respond

but listen to a grandson
on a distant horizon still ahead of you
who is living in a world of a new
scarcity

not unlike the hard, white, bone-dry
landscape of your youth in
which hope was a savage
thief

and men and women alike threw
themselves against the tide of
black and chased hatred into the
wilderness

the land here is going fallow again
i fear; the water is drying up,
the oceans staying away for
good

everything seems to be receding:
time, love, passion and God and
the goodwill of merciful men are all
impeached

there is a draining pull these days
that has the strength-in-draw
of the tides of your beloved
Lubec

where you once met Eleanor
Roosevelt visiting the sardine
factories that swelled the coastline with
workers

'she was so dignified'
you said of the First Lady
who summered with Franklin in
Campobello

the gilded island a stone's throw from
your impoverished shores: an emerald polished
by a billion-year-old sea and just out of your
reach

but everything was out of the reach
of those threadbare fingers,
those durable hands, weren't
they?

those measures of strength,
your hands, that sewed the dress
you wear in my purloined
picture

'she was so dignified'
you said of the First Lady
of the United States of
America

i want to know what that was
like: to be held fast in the vise of
brute poverty yet find in the
face

of wealth and privilege, of
first class comforts and easy
living, the visage of
'dignity'

i want your generous power to
see the long view, to peer past
the pretense of those in our ruling
class

to forgive shining contradictions
between those with and those without
when mashed together like that in
space

and see, for the better, something
grand in the superstructure
that underpins our society, something
essential

i'm of a cynic's age, perhaps, lacking
all the necessary impediments that you
endured in order to survive a broken
world

there are no real hardships in this
world that are not mere tokens when
the light from your past is shone upon
them

we've had it easy, i would tell you
in the pleasant visit under the tree:
we've all gone pale and need some
sun

but i see the malignancy around me;
the spreading crawl of a kind of
old pestilence not see since your
youth

i see the rise of a mind, a bothersome
shade cast at intelligence and reason
for the sake of the drunken dimness of
zealotry

i call out to you in your distance
there, silent and flat as a picture,
and pray that you send me
love

love of the kind from those days that
cut away the brine that separated a people
and brought them together to quell
enmity

and see in each other a lasting faith, a
vibrant energy, a desire toward grace and
kindness in all classes that gives a chance for
dignity

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no easy chair

she asks if she might be able to
sit with me and then pulls herself
up without waiting
for an answer

i have a pain in my side
that she presses against
by squirming into the
small place between me and
the arm of the chair using
her bottom as a pry

it's an old recliner
its back having lost its
strength and one side -
my side in fact - lags
beneath the seat

no easy chair,
coarse from the
wear of humans and animals,
reeking of pale urine and
dog's hide and crackers

yet i have slept in it many
times, a lot lately in fact,
covered in a blanket and
embracing a pillow like
a lover, fully reclined
and listing to the right

while across the living
room my wife has taken
to the couch in those late
hours (or are they early?)
when the baby awakens
screaming from a nightmare
and hurling her own blankets
to the floor

this evening the baby asks
if she might be able to sit
with me, shirtless with
her mouth milk-ringed,
her flesh is tranquil as
sea glass, her belly egg shaped

the pain in my side is a stitch
that comes from carrying
wood into the house and turning
one way while not bending my knees;
and scaling up into the chair
her bottom pushes against it
and i flinch and settle, flinch again

outside, sleet patters the window
that we covered in plastic last
october when we felt the tendrils
of a draft; the old collie is at my feet
gnawing on his paw like he's
digging to the root cellar

the minutes tumble from the ceiling
as if shoved from cliffs
and they fall to the
floor between my wife and i
while the child unfolds herself
from this awfully terrible
chair that groans, i flinch

she stomps across the living
room, across all those fallen
minutes and crawls up into
the heat of my wife's body
where i would love to be,
my most wanted place

only god really knows
i tell myself in the
dark, facing the window
under assault, the chair
palsied long ago makes
me feel on the edge of
falling

i turn to my ailing side
and ignore the pinch
while i watch the baby
and her mother sleep;
i smell the baby's hair
on my pillow and watch,
watch them sleep and watch
the minutes fall between us
in this no easy chair

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the moment

blind in my living
a life of fading passion
you offered access:
a touch in that old hallway
dilating these clouded eyes

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a loud peace

on a walk this morning, or
maybe recently, i came to
the boundary that separates
my property from my neighbor's
and found that overnight he'd
erected an encircling wall

an exaggerated thing, made of
mud bricks from the Nile,
it rose up far enough to
strain the neck and blot
out the east-rising sun
i'd once enjoyed at this hour

it now cast a shadow out
across my pasture, driving
the beasts north to where the
sun could be felt on their
backs, and the grasses in
shade had withered to dirt

walking the breadth of the wall,
i came to a gate in the side of it
that drew open, a gate made of
iron rods topped with filials of ivory
pointing skyward. in the center
an obscure crest of arms

from behind the gate stepped
my neighbor, who nodded and
to whom i said hello with a
raised hand and he made the
sound of a bull snorting, scuffing
the dirt with the toe of his boot

he began by asking me my position
on this or that - my position,
specifically asked in an intemperate
tone, a demand to account for my
thoughts and beliefs on where i
stood on issues that lately vexed

taking my silence to be in opposition
to his own stance, and converting
that opposition to an insult of himself
and his wife, his children, his parents,
and their forebears, he braced his jaw

he let loose a nonjudicial ruling against
me, in a barrage of unfiltered acrimony, as
if such a lecture - if it did not penetrate
my intellect most surely would penetrate
my skull with the force of it - was in
and of itself the sole and single way of
believing on the matter

i may have winced in the face of the
charge, not from finding truth in
it but from the bawl. his words
were merely feral cats let loose
into a decaying barn

tell me how you feel, though,
i said to him and smiled

this and this and that, he spat at me
this and this and that, he pointed over my shoulder
this and this and that, he concluded, lifting
his chin and looking down his nose at me with
arms folded atop a rounded belly

i imagined what i might look like
to him down that long ridge, down the
straight thin line that reminded me of
a sighted rifle

to him i imagined i looked
quite small and the perfect game
for this hunt he was on,
unarmed as i was, taken by surprise
and shivering from the morning cold

have you no passion at all?
he accused
i think i must have blinked, not
really in answer to him but more
in response to the spit he flung at me,
like coals tossed from a fire

have you no conviction? he demanded
have you no faith, no beliefs, no fire
for what the important things are now?

his questions were something like
a flag wrapped around the body,
a clever shroud that tightened the
more i wriggled

why do you squirm, when it is i
who finds himself struggling
to breathe? why do you fidget
when i am the one whose fortune
has been robbed of me?

robbed, i said quietly to myself

yes! robbed! by weak people who
did not work to earn their own
keep. i've no place to live,
no place to eat, no place to
worship, no place to enjoy the
comforts of my desires and will

i looked beyond him, into his
property, with its long uprising
green lawn, his flowering fruit
trees, his bright white home
that looked in the east-rising sun
like an alabaster cathedral

i'd not robbed him that i was aware,
and i suppose my expression said as much

...not by you, perhaps, you stand for nothing,
but by people of your own mind

...people who slack and slander, who
do wicked things against reason,

whose very beliefs are counter to history
and convention, and therefore a direct hindrance

to my liberties. they rob me with
their obstructions to the long establishment

i contemplated for a moment in his
loud sigh and his hoofing of the ground
with his boots

i suppose my silence, in the face of
the violent times, in the presence of
the growing tide that erodes the under footing,
could be taken as a sort of selective
moral apoplexy. those who remain silent
consent, it has been said

i've been quite loud about my convictions, i said to him

when?

in my silent living, i explained

he spat on the ground

in my silent loving, i explained

he spat on the ground

in my silent giving, i explained

he spat once more

the words of the coward!

i shrugged

weak!

i sunk my hands into my pockets

you weaken us all with your lack of fight,
you put us all in danger for the sake of your
desire to embrace everything. you must choose!

i lifted my eyes and looked at him

even nature excludes! it excludes!

he left with the slam of his gate and marched
up the long green way to his own home
and i walked toward mine in a melancholy

away from that wall, through growing
blades. past the animals who grazed
silently. beneath my meager fence
that snagged the sleeve as i passed
beneath the barbs and gouged the
flesh of my arm

cursing, i tended to the blood
with a cold rag as i sat before
the window that looks down over my
property and toward my neighbor's
new wall

i staunched the bleeding
until the constellations on the rag
had gone from crimson to
pink and then disappeared altogether

i thought of the important things
to which he referred and i smiled

the house was a loud peace

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Father

Finding the right solution to this particular
Angle, the one that has perplexed him for an hour, he
Thinks on it with his quiet resolve, his calm passion.
He is a master at steadfast patience, despite a wilting sun,
Even in the face of such wooden defiance, he surrenders not to the problems of life,
Resolving them instead with the love and grace of the carpenter's son

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