The Bones of His Being

The Bones of His Being

Sue Chenette 17 Bridgeview Road Toronto, Ontario M6S 4M9 416-769-2160 [email protected]

Contents Candelabra 3

i

Snapshot, 1948

5

Pendleton Shirt 6 Bird Diary 7 Long Distance 8 Talisman

9

At the Class Reunion, I Catch a Glimpse of My Father 10 Maxims 11 Trees in Price County 12 Weight 13

ii

Reading Huckleberry Finn 15 Music 16 One Small Thing 17 Griff Nordling 18 Food

19

Simple Gifts 21 A Transport of Grief if in the grey months 23 Want 24 Heron 25 Blessing 26 This is what I had to say 27 Need 28

Bones 29 Willow 30 Linger 31 Grudge 32 Both 33 Tansy 34 Quilt 35 With Me 36 So Simply 37 Vision 38 Night 39 I Thought 40

iii Your Watch 42 Eldest Daughter 43 Anger

44

At Dawn

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Crisp September Day 46 View

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My Father Made This Table 48 A Good Thunderstorm 50 Loosening 51 Among Kiwanians 52 In My Father’s Hand Spaces 55 What Remains 56

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To the child it looked as if his father were gazing off into a great distance and, looking up into these eyes which looked so far away, he too looked far away James Agee, A Death in the Family

to find the weight of bone the blue moment the almost reified shadow of his soul John B. Lee, from “The Old Man’s Hour”

for James Alden Bussey, 1917-1994

Candelabra What corner did we round in our ramble of father-daughter conversation to find that homemade candelabra – you, remembering, and I trying to imagine a vase of daisies placed on a polished board, and, either side, peeled branches, wavy, fitted halfway up with brackets holding candle sconces. It was hard to picture, so you sketched it for me, quick blue ballpoint strokes on a white paper napkin – two boughs, both forked, their inner forks cut to stubs, the outer limbs like swaying dancers’ arms lifting candles. “A fancy contraption,” you called it. A boy’s woodworking project, gift for your mother. “I don’t remember that she used it much.” You leaned back on the sofa as we laughed. Just talking after supper in the living room – something to balance the stumbled awkwardness of visiting you in hospitals, your stubborn silence at the end. Varnished boughs, vase on a platform real as if you held it out to me along with everything else that vanished.

3

i

Snapshot, 1948 Leaning against the pickup’s fender with collegiate grace, left leg bent over right, nonchalant, boot toe on the ground. Mud spatters a logo – Soil Conservation Service, freshly stencilled on the truck door. Your second summer in this small town job. Behind you, leafy branches shadow the house you rent upstairs with your wife and three young children. Sunday explains your dress pants, cuff-links, argyle tie – not clothes you wear to survey fields, planning a new ditch or grass-waterway. You must have changed shoes after church. Something in the canted hip, the folded arms and tilted head of privilege and ideals. Maybe it rained the night before and you are eager to measure the water level in Little Elk River – the sun catches your boots’ metal hooks, hinting at the possibility of a lost cuff-link, torn sleeve. White wrist, vulnerable above your farmer-tan.

5

Pendleton Shirt Handsome red-green plaid, you liked it as a jacket, with a bolo tie. Dressed for dinner, spruced in the soft wool, you offered drinks, or opened Audubon to confirm a grosbeak glimpsed in the neighbor’s pine. You could be light-footed, almost jaunty with a tray of sodas and Manhattans. No tightness hunched your shoulders, no fumble in your voice noting the grosbeak’s wing patch, its fat, seed-cracking beak. The woven colors of your shirt, its squares and stripes, the pockets’ diamond shapes fitted together – as our world did then: each piece in place. And we moved lightly too, as we set the table, keeping one eye on the window, not wanting to lose sight of the branch where the bird had settled, bright as happiness, then flown away.

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Bird Diary Thursday, August 6, 1987: Gold finch 2, Upland Sandpiper 1, Flickers 15, Crow 1, Kingbird 1

All that year they flitted, swooped, wove their bright hungry paths through his day. And he, noting a flicker’s startle of white, goldfinch’s flouncing yellow, retraced the colored thread of their flight, lighted it with naming.

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Long Distance I picture my father at the phone table by the window, and outside, the wide, sunny flatness of lawn and street. “Not feeling so good,” he says, then, “I just got back from a little walk” – something hopeful, his leaving the livingroom and its afternoon shadow. I tell him there are primroses here, springing in bursts beside the road, that from the small room where I write I’ve watched magpies rebuild their nest in a swaying poplar. Oh, what can I offer from this far place trying to make the sun glow through miles of undersea cable and pole-hoisted wire.

8

Talisman Old square nail you carried in a pocket, fingered among smooth coins – rust-pocked, blunt-broken tip – rough charm. Nothing simpler or more useful than a nail. You probably liked it for that, and because some workman of your parents’ generation hammered the sheared steel into wood – fathers and grandfathers’ steadiness in the pitted shank, their honest work. Or sometimes just the pleasure of your hand happening on a familiar object, its weight and shape and rasp.

9

At the Class Reunion, I Catch a Glimpse of My Father Rocks and dirt spraying like fireworks, Alvin says. That was the first time I met your dad, when he blasted out a new ditch on our farm. I was still in grade school out in Catawba – the early fifties. Bulldozers were big and clumsy then, built for roadwork. So he didn’t hire one. Instead they dug holes, packed them full of fertilizer, poured in diesel fuel, and set them off with a stick of dynamite. We always had dynamite on the farm for stumps and clearing fields. But your dad was the one who knew to use that combination. I was about ten. I thought that was really something – dirt and rocks, exploding into the air.

10

Maxims I come upon them scattered through his old files, in notes on books, news interviews, sermons he summarized from memory a speaker’s crisp formulation We need order in change and change in order succinct quotes scissoring through muddle Joseph Kennedy: When the going gets tough the tough get going. Compass, lifeline, bootstraps? What’s in a maxim? These days they energize sales reps, offer fuzzy comfort on web sites, amuse us reinvented by a wag ... the tough go shopping. But my father wrote them down without irony. There were those who were wise, who could guide him – there was a way, if only he could find it.

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Trees in Price County After the hike, I mounted them on tagboard for science class, printed neat labels – maple key, acorn, spruce and balsam cones, collected in the County Forest. Oh! Your dad can help – my mother’s cut-crystal voice filling lapses at the supper table – Wouldn’t that be good! In thin fall sunshine, the two of us among strewn leaves. (A nervous breakdown is just like measles, my mother said. You get sick, then get well again.) Our conversation stuttered. The whole sky showed through bare branches. No! Not good! I didn’t want to be here, struggling to talk to my father afraid the path might disappear beneath scattered brown and yellow – and how would we know our way out, with only sky and leafless trees every way we looked.

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Weight Your wallet, curved to fit a hip pocket. Bent into its folds, a library card, prescription for eyeglasses from R.J. Sneed, Frequent Diner ticket for the Scottie Club with six of twenty stars filled in. And tucked behind these, a small fan-folded pamphlet, its pleated pages opening to headlined paragraphs: WHEN THE WARNING SOUNDS MAIN EFFECTS OF THE BOMB FOOD – IT MUST BE SAFE In blue ballpoint you printed on the top page: name, address, phone, physician. And carried it for thirty years, long after the basement shelter, the urgent yet failed plan to buy a farm for refuge. How did it weigh against this pale green card, laminated, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste ...” or your Golden Age Passport to National Parks, family photos, the dailiness that put your wallet in your pocket, kept you moving through the world.

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ii

Reading Huckleberry Finn I set the book aside, and touched his shoulder. “Dad,” I asked, “Why did you change your mind about having the electroshock?” He said he’d been confused in his thinking; he’d thought the ECT would electrocute him and help him to die. I repeated what I’d said before, about the part of him deep inside – I knew, because he’d shown me Orion and Cassiopeia, and how to feather my paddle at the end of a J-stroke, keeping the canoe steady. He said, “Living is good for the younger generation. But I’m dying.” I told him I’d read some more. That even if he was dying, he might as well enjoy a good story. Sometimes when I read to him he seemed almost asleep, but when I glanced up now I saw him watching me open-eyed, and thought he might lose himself in Huck’s adventure – the way my brother and I had, nestled into the sofa’s solace as we drifted down the Mississippi, the sky all speckled with stars that lingered when the book was closed, the King and the Duke and Huck and Jim alive in his voice.

15

Music I searched through the cassettes I’d brought for The Shepherd on the Rock. Sunday, Dad had opened his eyes, leaned his head on one hand as the melody arced from the boom box I found at the nursing station – clarinet and voice lightly tethered to the piano’s pulsing chords, – minor, major, minor – the bass line lifting it all inexorably forward. His breathing eased, the white fold of sheet and beige coverlet rose and fell, an even rhythm. When the music finished – after the clarinet hovered on a trill and then the piano, rollicking, and the singer and clarinet, climbing higher and still higher, discovered springtime – he asked, “Who wrote that song?” Today his eyes stayed closed, just his right eyebrow slightly lifting with a long soprano note.

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One Small Thing The problem was, they treated him like any patient, all routines and protocols. The nurses dosed an old man in a bed, the psychiatrist filled in white space on a clipboard. They didn’t know him, they hadn’t canoed the Brule with him, paddled all morning in rain, the green heron flapping up as we rounded red clay banks and it was possible – wasn’t it? If we found the one memory, one lost part of him, that one small thing, like the bee’s wing that changes the tornado’s path.

What glib tongue spoke then, what thoughtless impulse that morning after the nurse changed his diaper. When an aide wheeled him out in his chair and I went back to get my bag, the nurse, bundling the diaper and shit-stained towel, said wryly, “Well, at least his system’s working,” and I said, “That’s good,” and then – jovially, as if she and I were allies: “Well, maybe not so good for you.” And turning, saw Dad still there, waiting, in the quiet hall – no way to undo my words.

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Griff Nordling Griff Nordling, with his neat slacks and brief case and salmon-coloured shirt, leaned across the table where Mary had brought Dad in his wheel chair. He said the court proceeding could be delayed if Dad would eat and take his medication, and asked whether he was eating now. When Dad refused to answer, his thick brown sweater hanging loose as an older brother’s coat, Griff looked away – like a man caught in conversation on the wrong side of the room.

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Food Mary, the motherly, energetic nurse, sat next to Dad in the common room where she’d wheeled him for lunch. She offered him bites of macaroni and cheese casserole. “Oh, chef salad,” she said to me across the table. “I really like chef salad.” Dad was refusing to eat. “You have to eat,” Mary said, not unkindly. “The court requires that you be fed.” “The laws of nature supersede the laws of man,” Dad answered. “But if you don’t eat, you’re taking it out of God’s hands.” * Tara said he could go back to bed if he’d finish one thing. She bent his straw, offered him milk, and when she urged the straw into his mouth he sucked at it ravenously. * He ate no supper, though he stared at my sandwich and salad. “Raw spinach,” he said into the silence between us. * 19

When they buzzed me in through the little L-shaped lounge, the boy with lank blonde hair looked up and said, “You should’ve seen your dad at breakfast. He picked up his fork and ate by himself. Boy, were we surprised.” A young woman with wide-set, slightly vacant eyes said softly, “I think he wanted to do it on his own.” * “You can have supper with your daughter,” Sandy said. She put a video into the TV. We could watch it, or just turn it off. It was an informational film, Depression Can be Treated. Dad watched intently. I could see his high, sharp cheekbones reflected on the screen, in the thirty-ish woman’s green dress, the reassuring doctor’s bookcase. I ate my ham and pineapple, my jello, slowly. Dad ate nothing. When the film finished, I said, “Dad, I don’t understand why you can’t eat.” “I don’t either,” he said, almost inaudibly, his shoulders hunched in his loose sweater, gaze fixed on his knees, the TV blank and mute. Finally I said “Dad, do you think you’re supposed to die?” He rasied his head, his eyes barely meeting mine, and nodded, a single slow motion. If I could just say the one right thing here – and so I said there was no way he deserved to die. He looked down at his clenched fists. Food cart rattling in the hall, nurses’ voices. When he spoke his voice was raspy, with a cold ring, like cutlery laid down hard on a plate: “I want to go back to bed.” 20

Simple Gifts Just before I left the hospital I told Dad I’d play Appalachian Spring on his Walkman, that it ended with variations on “Simple Gifts.” This was his favorite song. We sang it together. He was lying back on his pillow and his voice was thin, but he sang all the way through. I plugged in the headphone cord, and fitted the little sponge-covered speakers over his ears. He said, “Isn’t there a place for you to put earphones in too?”

I kept thinking about it on the way to the parking lot – how he’d wanted to listen together, how maybe if I’d brought a Walkman with two headphone jacks that might have been the moment where it all started to get better.

My keys were locked in the car. I stood there with the bag of food I’d brought hoping just the right crunch or sweetness would tempt his appetite. It wasn’t even very good, the molasses cookies too salty, the oatmeal raisin bland, and the banana bread –

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the end where I’d sliced four pieces in the car before I went up to Dad=s room – was crumbling. When the locksmith arrived I gave him the bread and half the cookies. I would have given him everything, only it seemed too much to ask of him, to take it all away.

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A Transport of Grief

if in the grey months when you invited death you kept alive the thinnest impulse – plant the garden weed and water it – which counts for more the accumulated hours or that small urge toward life

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Want “I think he wants you to let go,” my mother says. “Is that what you want, Jim?” My father shakes his head no, the thin pad of his palm warm in my hand, his fingers curled loosely around mine. He is trying to speak. “Do you want water?” my sister urges. “Do you want a pencil to write something down?” I lean my ear close to the slack hole of his mouth. “Read his lips,” Mother says. “It’s easier. Tell him what you think he might be saying.” “Oh, Daddy,” my sister says, “We don’t know what you want. We can’t hear you.”

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Heron I tell my father about seeing the great blue heron as I jogged along the Humber, and the wild geese flying in unison upstream. He offers his fingers – to hold, I think – but frowns, lifts his white-braceleted arm, his hand rising large and red from the skeletal groove between radius and ulna, and I understand – ten times I lift and lower, the way the therapist does. this small painful hope When I ask about the other arm he shakes his head: No.

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Blessing My sister stands by my father’s bed, weeping, holding his hand. His lips shape soundless words. “I think he’s saying I love you,” my mother offers. “Is that right, Jim?” He nods. When I hold his hand, his lips at first don’t move. And when at last his mouth stretches and purses, just slightly, I am afraid to ask because he might not answer or might nod out of confusion or have tried to say something else and given up.

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This is what I had to say That if he still wanted to live there were so many people who loved him and would help. That it was still possible though it would mean he would have to eat. I didn’t mean to say what he should choose, it was his decision and I hoped most he could be peaceful whatever he chose but I wanted him to know he had a choice. My father’s mouth worked furiously then – those soundless words we couldn’t make out. “Do you want to live, Daddy?” my sister asked. “Wink if you understand.” He gazed at us, forehead an angry knot. “Do you want to die?” He shook his head. “Do you not want to talk about it?” He winked then – slow, deliberate eyelid.

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Need My father jerks his thumb like an angry hitchhiker – the clearest gesture he’s made all day. He wants the nurse, Joan, to turn him over. “His favorite side,” she says when I find her. It’s most often Joan he wants, when we try to lip-read, offer urgent guesses: Water? Hold his hand? Does he want to listen to the Sibelius we’ve brought, pages he’s always loved in Sand County Almanac? Joan turns his covers down, grasps the pad he lies on, deftly pulls him across the bed and rolls him over. He is only jutting bones now – so light. “Well, buddy,” she says, “I’ve got to turn you one more time. You’ve got a wrinkle under your butt.” She rocks him onto his back, straightens the creased bedding. I stand and watch. I am not the one who knows he likes his right side best, who offers the intimacy of comfort.

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Bones His skin gleams in the watery light, taut along his chin, the knobbed hinge of jaw. Cheeks and temples sunk to nothing. “Doesn’t he have beautiful bones?” my mother says, quietly, so as not to wake him, and I think she must mean more than cheekbones and brow – must mean the bones of his being, seen clear through the love and stubborn burrs tangled in their marriage. I think she is fixing this in memory. Sun spills, reflects on the tiled floor a wide lake. She is far from me, on the distant shore.

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Willow His forehead is smooth this morning, that fierce knot between his eyes relaxed. He is looking out the window: willow tree, wooden fence, corner of a house. When we hover around his bed, he frowns, motions with his index finger. Does he want fresh water? Oxygen on the bedside table? Would he like someone to turn him over? Should we call the nurse? He shakes his head, points again and my sister says, Oh – we are standing in the sunlight, blocking his view of the willow.

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Linger We linger on the sofa, my sister and I still in pajamas, Mother with a second cup of coffee, a bound volume of Dad’s letters home from Japan – and other letters too, from aunts, grandparents – on a footstool where we left it late last night. We don’t know what we’re looking for, sometimes find it – Dad wanting to teach his children birds and trees and my sister says, “See ... he planned to do that.” We pause at half-forgotten place names, holidays – was that the time he let us use his plaid scarf for the snowman? – drawing the past around us: “Grandma knitted you the prettiest things,” Mother says. “You had a little navy sweater, with yellow lambs.” The sky outside is overcast. We cover our knees with the gold and maroon afghan – so familiar, we can=t remember a time without it – reluctant to dress, to go out into the morning and the routine of visiting hours, wanting this warmth a little longer.

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Grudge My mother tells the story on herself as we sit by my father=s bedside – how his roommate until last week, Ray, who had Alzheimer’s, said “I want her out of this room. She talks too much.” My father, listening, forms a little smile, one could even say, a mean smile, the kind we allow ourselves when someone vindicates a grudge. I think my mother’s story is a plea, a wish to be absolved: that my sister and I are meant to remove a sting of accusation. I sit with my arms hard-crossed. I will not participate in this, will say nothing, not now, not back home when she dismisses his retirement dream, the farm they didn’t buy – “The sort of person who could handle a farm would have spent more time doing repairs around this house.” The two of them complicit in their marriage. Sure, she coaxed him out of bed, called friends to visit, doctors, arranged for hospitals. But she will not ask him if he wants his ashes scattered or interred. She has simply chosen a cemetery plot. Someone has to be accountable.

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Both We’ve come upstairs to my mother’s bedroom for the sweater she offered this chilly morning. She’s wearing navy slacks, a white turtle neck, red and blue plaid shirt. “Do you think I should change?” she asks. “Do these pants look too baggy?” And though she’s far beyond young or slender, there is a young girl’s worried hopefulness in her voice: Am I pretty enough; Will I be loved? It penetrates my anger – how can she be both this soft woman and the wife who scornfully gave my father C plus for the room he repainted. How can I be both the woman roiling with accusation and the daughter who helps her choose a skirt, wine-colored, and a silky blouse.

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Tansy what if... should have... still... words my sister and I fumble, as we dress in our childhood bedroom or drive in the car, or sit in the lobby at Court Manor beneath the TV’s mute flickering, while a nurse bathes our father. Midday, his naptime, we drive to Lakeshore Park and stumble down asphalt steps, cracked and buried in weeds, to the old pier. We used to swim here. Now it’s only half-familiar, a new factory hijacking the hillside, the dock falling away, just enough solid wood to walk out to the end. Bright yellow buttons dot the hill. They seem robbed, too, lacking petals. “That’s tansy, I think,” my sister says. Out on the dock our words spill, tangle, circle back, as minnows slip around the pilings. No answers. Only this place, a lost confessional. Tansy-strewn hillside, wide blue bay.

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Quilt My brother lays his harmonica on a square of the patchwork quilt that brightens the empty bed next to our father’s. He would have played old songs we used to sing together, if Dad had winked for yes instead of no. The quilt belonged to Ray. He shared the room until he caught pneumonia and his body couldn’t remember how to fight. Someone stitched the red-green-yellow squares, wanted him to have whatever comfort he could find in colour, as if apple red and leaf green were a kind of music that reached to pull the spirit back.

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With Me He will be with me, I tell my father, when I see the hickory and white ash by the Humber, or search the field guide for a new bird, like the ovenbird we saw trailing a wing through dry leaves on top of Old Baldy. “Even when I eat apple pie,” I say, recalling his quip about a late-night snack: “Want some cold apple pie? It’s not so hot.” Only, this time, I feel awkward, when I tell about the pie – he doesn’t smile, just looks at me. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened a book he’d given me years back, John Muir’s writings about wilderness, and read ... the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life ... I tell him these thoughts – trilliums pushing under dead leaves, saplings from fallen trees – make me more peaceful about his dying, and, while the words are on my tongue, this is almost true.

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So Simply The kidneys fail, after months of food and drink refused. My mother holds his hand. The nurse brings a blood pressure cuff, lays a stethoscope against his thin gown. He winces at the cold metal. He lies open-eyed. So slow, the rise of his collar bone below the red bulge of his Adam’s apple. Long pauses. Ragged breaths. Then none. “I think he’s gone.” My sister reaches her palm to his mouth: there may be the faintest exhalation, and we watch, uncertain, ten minutes. “I think he’s gone,” my mother says again. We call the nurse, who shines a small beam into his eyes. This is how death comes – just a stopped breath. His face looked peaceful, stilled lips, grey-blue eyes we couldn’t close.

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Vision Wind, and gulls, a mesh of tracks in sand, grasses swaying at the water’s edge. This is where we need to come when we leave our father’s body stretched on the narrow bed – no sense that death is anything but the end of life. We have driven west of town. My sister points to where clouds mottle waves far out on the lake. Cars that pass on the highway behind us are of a different world. We feel the long breath of wind that stirs the water. On the drive home, the lake’s expanse still a balm, it comes clear as a slow dream – he will have to stay awhile, visit farms he worked on, the house he shared with Mom. Maybe touch certain trees once more. He will do this with detachment, a sweet knowledge that requires a vastness – the way children look at a small globe, blue oceans, green continents – how our sad or brave or foolish lives are part of perfect galaxies. He might pause outside the dining room window, or near the tall blue spruce he passed on walks. Later, he will be with the wind, the gulls, over the choppy lake. Pure spirit.

38

Night After the necessary phone calls reciting the hour of his death; after repeating that he wasn’t in pain, receiving condolences; after the pizza we order because it’s already dark outside and we should eat some supper – whatever I felt at the lake, what may have been only a transport of grief, has faded. I am back to knowing that my father has died, that it was a rotten way to go, depressed, some days wanting to live, most days not. I go out for air, walk south along MacArthur, staring at neighbors’ houses, a few windows lit, at lawns, a boat trailer in a driveway, all this part of his life: walking here, observing these things. I keep on to where the blacktop ends, houses giving way to brush. The unknowable night, my father gone into it. Standing on the gravel curve, I search the sky for Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper. Dogs bark in the distance, a steady yip, yip. A street light shines on milkweed blossoms and stiff straw-colored grasses, mystifying the pale backs of maple leaves.

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I thought if I wrote him a get-well note every day if I brought lemon-poppyseed muffins if I taped Sibelius, Chopin, Sousa marches if I woke memories of canoe trips on the Brule, or springtime hikes, squelch of old leaves, birdsong if I massaged his feet with cool lotion if I made Tuesday’s nurse understand he should not be badgered like a child when he refused to eat if I stayed through suppertime if I reasoned with him if I read him one more chapter before I went home if I could only say it clearly if he knew I would come tomorrow

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iii

Your Watch Jostled, it begins to run again – the crimson sweep-second-hand. I give impossible challenges: if it reaches 6, circles five times as if the mechanism were Lazarus. Some want time to balloon and fold but you believed in the even count of minutes, in speed limits and table manners. Something you held to even when days and months blurred grey. A hair-thin rim of seconds, tips of hands that touch like letters, conversations, the way you noted particulars. A red leaf pivots opposite the second hand’s fine wand, its counter-balance. Grasses, rainfall, loams and silts, the nesting habits of birds. But most of all trees, their branching shapes: When you walked in a forest did time collapse, your watch a mere habit on your wrist? In those last months, with your lips pressed thin in stubborn refusal to eat, did you still wear it? I can’t recall metal and crystal – glimmering gesture, slow tilt of your head. 42

Eldest Daughter If you’re the first-born, if you played with a spoon and pail in a sunny patch of tomato vines where your father was making his garden from seedlings and ideals if you were the first one he taught to know a white pine’s fine fivebundled needles, a Norway pine by its wiry two; and how birches, budding, are hazy red, aspens pale green if you are the daughter who climbed with him to the top of Old Baldy, and saw the elusive ovenbird trailing its wing in dust and leaves, you might try to be, for him, the keeper of a place where sun falls through leafy branches, where the ovenbird’s tee-cher, tee-cher can always be heard, where he finds himself happy. You might regret, later, never telling him the discoveries you made on your own. You might be afraid he never quite knew you; that you stayed half hidden in the soft green foliage.

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Anger

Mostly I kept it caged, coiled in its constricting knot, hissing softly. How it would have liked to sink its fangs into the belly of the pompous young doctor who refused to let my father stay in the cardiac ward where a gentle nurse walked him up and down the sunny corridor as if he might heal. How its muscle clenched wanting to strike the shouting attendant who threatened a stomach tube. * Concealing its flickering tongue from my mother, its sibilant litany of accusation, all her wrongs, I piled stones around it: rough walls, their jagged outer surface meant to bruise. It nestled behind them, warming itself. * I thought it had shriveled by now, wasted to skin and skeleton, but when I crept to its rusted door it startled from its logy state, lidless eyes again alert for prey: Someone had blundered and if only they would do things right, my father could still begin to straighten, stretch his limbs where he curled in his hospital bed.

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At Dawn All pine and wind, this morning’s path up Tunnel Mountain. Loose-blown clouds. I try to name these western trees – trunks skinny, scabby black, soft-tufted needles – as you did, pointing out white spruce and balsam on Sunday rides in Wisconsin. When this war is finally over and I get back home, you’d written from General MacArthur’s Tokyo, I’ll teach Susie and Billy the names of all the trees and flowers, animals and birds. Street lamps, and a few lit windows in chalets and bungalows shine up from Banff. The Bow loops, a gleam through russet plain. Fresh snow high on Mount Bourgeau to the west. Everywhere, expanse. Returning, you leaned out the train window in Montana, photographed cattle browsing on endless grass. Such open country, you’d marvel again whenever the Kodachrome filled the screen. So much seemed possible. Here, in early morning: the town’s waking among the firs and aspen, snow-swept mountains – a harmony you dreamed of in a post-war world, the valley washed fresh in light, clouds briefly tinted rose.

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Crisp September Day ... he would be designing a drainage system on our farm during the Fall months. We have memories of him looking thru his transit during a crisp Septemberday and writing down notes of terrain elevations with a flock of geese flying over. B a letter from Arthur Palmquist of Brantwood, Wisconsin

Suppose someone you loved gave a handkerchief or book – something he’d often held in his hands – to a person you never met. Say it was your father who did this – gave things to people you didn’t know. Only they weren’t paper or cloth – more like slips of dream. When he died they were scattered: blown dandelion seeds, untethered balloons. What oddly-tinged happiness when one floats back, shimmer of still-green pasture and russet woodlot, my father under a sharp-blue autumn sky, wild geese flying above a field I never saw.

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View This snow, as if the air were gathering itself into the thick wet flakes that stream down, bandaging the trees’ bare jutting limbs, settling with soft white weight the tangle of cat’s-cradled twigs. Is this what you looked for, that August day of your dying, with windowsill flowers splintered into red-orange hues by the strident sun, your gaze fixed on something we couldn’t see, your hand a hard gesture – Don’t –

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My Father Made This Table Scratched and nicked, but still when I uncovered the coffee table in the garage, the wood was beautiful – sepia landscape streaked with shadow – and I remembered how once you looked at it a long while, told me you’d sanded seven times, used seven coats of wax. “Oak?” the lumber clerk said when I wheeled it in. Thinking I should have asked, written it down. Not oak. The grain too even. Not like the planks in the bin along the wall, I pointed out, with their flared chevrons. What was it – “Could it be fruit-wood?” “Never heard of that,” he said. I stared at the smoothed, scratched surface hours of sanding “Could be mahogany,” he offered. But that I would have remembered. It was something simpler, less well-known. I thanked him, brought it home. It did look something like mahogany’s wide and narrow ribbons – Oh, but it wasn’t –

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Days later I awoke thinking gumwood, and found my dictionary, where I read “hard wood used sometimes to imitate mahogany,” in a rush of relief as if I could stop the way time blurs memory just by saying: my father made this table out of gumwood.

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A Good Thunderstorm “He used to surprise me – we’d have a good thunderstorm and I=d see him out there walking across the field and I’d say, What the heck is he doing?” When Andy Pohlod, with his tonsure of white hair and his air of country sense and humor, tells me this about my father, I think at first I will set his words unattended on a page, let them tell their own part of who my father was. Only, isn’t there something in his tone, a farmer’s sly assessment of a city man who learned from books and when I find it here leaking into the poem, I’m an anxious girl again, ready to defend, can’t stop myself from writing my father was the kind of man who took pride in fine work – that’s why he walked in a thunderstorm to check the new-dug ditches.

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Loosening Where the Joe Pyeweed pokes green shoots among old leaves, I rake in short sweeps, cool air slipping along my arm, the day loosening in low light and scattered birdsong. My father on a long-ago spring evening, bending to his garden. I jolted across the lawn on my bicycle, off to after-supper play, turning back to wave, pedaling along the alley against the tug of I could help – keep him company. Up ahead someone was calling Ollie Ollie Oxen Free, another dashing from behind a shed. Neither of them fumbling for something to say to their fathers in the silence of helping thin the carrots. I wanted to run and shout and kick the can. Small bluebells, transplanted by squirrels, speckle the grass and scent the air. I scoop a handful of leaves from among periwinkle vines, straighten, pause, breathing the evening in ... all these years thinking he needed me, there, as the day gave up its heat and dusk softened around him.

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Among Kiwanians Blue banners draped against the red velvet curtain of a small stage. Two long tables – tuna sandwiches made thick on whole wheat with lettuce, bowls for soup. Stapled song sheets on each folding chair. I’m a guest – in town for the Kiwanis Music Festival. “Will you be judging our piano player?” one of the men jokes. He has a freckled forehead, white hair combed back, his shirt a windowpane-check, like Dad used to wear. “My father was a Kiwanian,” I find myself saying. It’s so easy to imagine him here in this church hall, with the portrait of the young Queen (though back home it would have been a boyish President Kennedy), honor rolls framed along the wall, among these older men with their good will, good smiles, good manners. We have a sing-along before we eat. “Shine on Harvest Moon,” then “Side by Side.” No one’s shy – the pianist punches chords, everyone sings out. Dad’s baritone echoes just inside my ear. He loved those old happy songs.

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In My Father’s Hand Mostly it’s who, what, where, when – all the cousins at the picnic, errands, conversations, mileage and weather and winners at Scrabble. In these spiral notebooks we called The Logs he is the scribe, but when I look for him he slips into his reporter’s role, spelling out details, appearing in third person Jim drove out and picked up Mother Marian among parents, nieces, in-laws, grandchildren – all those family trips and gatherings. Here, though, on an afternoon in Seattle, his hosts at work, my mother resting, the point of view shifts – Jim drove to Magnuson Park. There I walked along the shore of Lake Washington, into the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration area. Overleaf, two mysteries: a small sketch, and beneath it, copied out in quotes Through the serene tranquilities of the sea, among waves whose hand clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on.

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The sketch, labeled NOAA Bridge, is of a ring topped with a long, squat pentagon. All I can make out is a skinny doughnut wearing a wide-brimmed hat. A clue in this quick diagram to an afternoon’s solitary pleasure? The drawing not detailed enough to spell out bridge to anyone but him. His footfalls on stone, the October Monday’s mist or sun, or wind blowing through.

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Spaces In the spaces between his words hesitations shaped by the edges of consonants or a soft-trailing vowel as the words left the shelter of his thought to breathe and get their bearings I knew my father best.

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What Remains after a photograph by Eliot Porter Stonescape of scoured hollows, clefts and veins – in the dry canyon stillness an eddying wind is almost visible, and water deepens a carved channel – like the white curves in an Escher print, or ashen glow caught in the moon’s crescent * ... absence echoes presence old letters, voice cupped in a looped scrawl ghost that sleeps in my father’s wool jacket seasons curling in a brown leaf * Where surfaces have been scooped out and abraded what remains – rock pared to stubborn ridges, pattern, too intricate to trace, maze of fissures in the layered stone.

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Notes: “Reading Huckleberry Finn”: The sky “all speckled with stars” is quoted from chapter 19 of Mark Twain’s novel. “With Me”: The quote is from John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. “In My Father’s Hand”: The brochure NOAA Western Service Center Art Walk describes “two terra-cotta concrete bridges … imbedded with quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,” designed by sculptor Siah Armajani in 1983.

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Acknowledgements Many thanks to the editors of the following magazines, where some of these poems, often in slightly different versions, first appeared: The Antigonish Review, Ascent Aspriations, Contemporary Verse 2, Heliotrope, Upstairs at Duroc, and Verse Wisconsin. The sequence A Transport of Grief was published as a chapbook, in an earlier version, by LyricalMyrical Press in February 2007: my gratitude to Luciano Iacobelli. I’m grateful to many poets, friends and mentors who have offered encouragement, advice, and illumination: Pam Bernard, Allan Briesmaster, Rosemary Clewes, Jennifer K. Dick, Maureen Scott Harris, George Hinson, Helen Humphreys, Babo Kamel, John Kliphan, Donna Langevin, Jacqueline Malone, Bruce Meyer, Muriel Nelson, Merle Nudelman, Chris Pannell, Patty Rivera, E. Alex Pierce, Ruth Roach Pierson, Julie Roorda, Norma Rowen, and Martha Zweig. Special thanks to Barbara Beck for conversational musings on the idea of a memory box made of poetry, the impetus for those poems that spring from keepsakes. To Sue Wheeler, for helpful advice on early drafts of “A Transport of Grief.” And to Barry Dempster, for his poetic acumen and his patient insistence on the poems’ behalf. Thanks to the Banff Centre’s 2004 and 2008 Wired Writing programmes. Thanks to Wisconsinites Alvin Bochler, Arthur and James Palmquist, and Andy Pohlod for their memories of my father, and to Griff Nordling for graciously allowing the use of his name. Thanks also to Sheila Stewart for A Hat to Stop a Train, and to Marie Howe for What the Living Do, poems of grief and loss that I turned to while writing this book. Thanks to Michael Mirolla and Connie McPartland, for their capable captaining of Guernica Editions. Deep gratitude to Elana Wolff, for her keen eye and ear, and her belief in the manuscript. And as ever, my deepest thanks to my husband Steve, for his love and support, and for his insightful readings of my work.

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