Poems 4 A.M

I. MASSACHUSETTS Boston Ancestors I hear them behind me crossing Persian rugs on heel-less shoes, drinking Dubonnet, eating nuts (from the pantry the smell of stew), talking about naval battles and varsity crew, their voices raspy with cigars in underheated rooms. Someone sewed their eyes shut with needlepoint thread and when they speak they make up for it in booming tones. It is somewhere out of them alive or dead I have sprung. Yet not a person there seems to recognize me. Not one. Bulbs Even in the dead of winter he is talking about bulbs. Walking after dinner with my father. There is snow, moonlight everywhere. Cold. The loop is short. We pass where he planted a hill in the fall. Above us stars in the dark seed sky. Their scattered pattern is something we might discuss something he knows from navigating boats. I look up. It's like breathing ice. Glitter. My father's attention, though, is on the knotty wooden claws he's pressed in. He knows where they are below a packed layer of earth, then all that snow above. The tree shadows crisscross and humps push up more sparkling white and all he can think of, walking with his daughter, is bulbs. Daffodils? I ask. Yes, he says, this father of seven. I planted them in clusters. Family Dog You left, not I. One by one there were less of you. Less bicycles tipping off stands. Less leftovers I'd get of stew. Less and less shouts and then fewer hands To pull back my ears or smooth my head, Or strangle my throat till my tongue went dry. Some of you changed tastes, slept with cats instead. Each, apart, you told me you loved me: a lie. You each went, snapping your suitcase shut. I loped after each car. Barking at the end Of our drive. I could only stray so far. What I was attached to in you would not stretch or bend. When the last who sucked his bottle lying on my fleecy side Left, I ambled off to where dogs bereft go Down by the railroad tracks, and died. New England Rock I could never travel so far or stay so long in the desert or stand under veils and veils of rain that it could change where I began. My life rose up this way: a round hill studded with rocks, a winter sea not freezing for rocking at a rocky shore, cellars with rocks pushing up through the floor. I tried to get away. I flew across the world into a man's fig mouth. I circled mangrove roots like a whirling drain. I swam deranged in cocoa river mud and huddled against palm trees waving. The ballast in my pocket kept throwing me down. It was meant to steady, but it kept all of us off balance, the stones we carried. It looked like slapstick. We tried to laugh it off. The pratfalls of a drunk. Or we had another drink to keep it light. Would that it were easy not to feel so dense in this land mined with headstones. Would that we wouldn't turn so cold overlooking soaked grey fields or slapping the rope up on the bow. You see it in people's mouths, the granite tightening of their souls. I move close to another for some heat and the warmest thing I feel is doubt. I dive into a pile of leaves and hit the ground hard. Would that these rocks lodged here so fixed and stern would give me something fixed and firm as belief. The Cliff Crawlers I have to crawl up. It is a rock-scramble crawl. Bitten pen in my teeth. They say it's easier if you're small, tearing at roots till they're ragged as curtain pulls. I slide back when I hear men rearing motorboats out on the lumpy bay, their engines revving out of the water, backing up, tMinot, Susan is the author of 'Poems 4 A.M', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375412585 and ISBN 0375412581.