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