for my great grandmother
We never met, but you have promised this
would heal, the place in the earth,
the root system you dragged with your skirts
into the grave. It is all recorded in the veins
of ore striped into rock, or rings in the tree, so we
can tell what growing season, what glacier, what rapture
created this place. You were dry as
a tablecloth by then, your face like rock
in the sun. I’m the one you were afraid
of becoming. Even as a girl I put hammer
to granite and then sat at the table, sorting the crystal
from the basalt. I am the black
flecks that drifted in your liquid eye
while it snowed and snowed
outside, so far from the spring
inside your name. If you can stand the cold,
it is so beautiful here, you wrote in your scrapbook,
between clippings of Amelia before she crashed
the plane that was never found,
and the royal who gave up his throne to marry
an ordinary American. You painted when you found
the time and washed your hands to make dinner:
those wet worlds drying under your bed while you
spread out the dinner set, did anyone see them?
Before dawn, you caught in a cold moment
the gray creek leading nowhere, and then painted
the same scene flooded with sun, two versions
side by side. But between them was the moment
you didn’t paint, when every line
is sharp and true: is that what your son’s son
has become? An accidental birth, the final
instant before the sun swept the valley clean, erasing
the words inside your mouth.
It is why he left: to find what his father never found
in a welder’s shop, behind the bus wheel,
something he couldn’t say
even to these open fields. I am sorry to bring you back
to this pretty and cold place, but I had to ask
before the city called me away, before I forget
what is at stake. Oh, I am still full
of what made this place. The crushing
rock and slow sheets of ice, what I am coming
to believe: that destruction is
creation. What would you make
of me now, standing inside the snake’s belly
and listening to the hush hush of subway doors,
the slick rain darkening my hair, my wet
hands on a man’s arms, face, breathing and shaking.
I came back to ask you if the guilt
holds for every generation, whatever the canvas.
Dirt or bedsheets, sky or tablecloth, your worlds
glistening under the bed, and turpentine seeping up
into the air while he slept beside you—does it linger,
the dream you lay your belly against? I cry
the hardest when I’m trying to stop. It rained down
on you sometimes too, I know, like what a lover once
said about sex, but it holds for the soul too—it will grow
tangled and press at the gate, whether we tend to it or not.
How he tasted to you coming in from
the outside: sharp with sweat and smoke, a plane’s exhaust, the life
he tried to give you when he shut the gate behind him.