I put too much pepper in the stirfry so I fish
the broccoli out, run it under cold water,
make the meal plain. My grandmother died
last summer and she’s in the pot of oil-scrimmed water, my ghost
face in windows, and I know there are too many dead grandma
poems, not enough about the iPod Nation, but I called her
Nonna Erminia, she lived in Naples,
and some days I hardly remembered she existed—
I was busy and she was rich and racist, a Victorian
vase, the old-fashioned lace you forget in a box in the back of the closet
and to love the masses I had to hate her though I never
could so I mustered up indifference, a critical
distance, and sent her a card saying, I miss you—
and when I went to Italy for the funeral, the card
was propped on her nightstand, she loved me that much or
so few cards came or both, and what if I loved
an idea more than the body—
its charts and maps
and not the beloved beside me.
Perhaps the one good act in my one small life was to send a card
and what if one day I see the sky’s spires, its stones of blue light, and my eyes,
screen-tired, can’t see them
which is to say I see them but can’t feel
them because to see a simple sky with its simple stones,
to feel that church inside me,
takes practice,
which I never tell my students.
I want them to know poetry
is hard work, to fill the reader
with your uglies, your swans—
the forks and cul-de-sacs of an Ohio girlhood …
And I’ve never told the truth:
the work isn’t time—it’s the everyday
openings.
My dad once said, When my father died I was relieved,
and I didn’t say anything. I’ve tried
writing a dozen poems about that day, they all failed.
I couldn’t imagine his story—
hating or fearing or some-other-something feeling
a father so much that when he dies you don’t wake
in the night, your teeth in the pillow, glottals clogging and knotting
your throat. The day my dad passes, snows will shoot up,
the glass fall. I’ll be a small girl
in a small jar
and it will take all my work to shear a hole,
I won’t leave the way I came—
snowghoul
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
titsay
