For My Father

On Your Thirty-Ninth Birthday

We walk on woodchips in October

while he sings the Beatles.

His hands are so large, calloused:

my baseball mitts.

Those same hands that place a waterski in my own,

that knead seven-year-old spines

whisper of sparrows

and gold nuggets every night.

This is the same man who illegally weights

our blue Weeblo race cars (we win)

and ferries birthday parties of six-year-olds

around in the green go-cart he built himself.

In winter he becomes Chanukah Harry

with a long martial artist’s braid.

Every summer he is the River King,

flanked by egrets and swallows,

a rooster tail pluming out behind him

as his body skids just inches above the water.

He tows cousins, endures every “one last time,”

follows teen rowers carving oar in eddy.

He sings the Beatles one rainy day in February,

injecting oranges with insulin.

He always leaves the sprinklers on too long

so we can sprint after leprechauns.

Hands so rough yet perfect for shaking.

Ocean child with windy hair, he sings.

Gentle Pop with holiday eyes, she sings back.

Happy birthday,

she loves you all across the universe.

Saralee's Waltz

Saralee’s Waltz

Every morning she resumes her love affair

with the piano lounging on the sleeping rug

as the light slips in beyond the highest stair

one arthritic palm dangles mid air

the piano holds its breath as flesh meets key

skating along the surface to an internal melody

Fingers play hopscotch across the piano

rewinding jump ropes from a Cleveland house

ten siblings crowded one bathroom in 1929

twelve dollar piano paid in monthly installments

She got a scholarship to Julliard in World War Two

The only musician with long hair and eyelashes

Raised two daughters and a farm read Marx Hallelu

Jah to the god she never believed existed after all

Where was he when her brothers were black listed

Morning rises on Sixteenth Street fifty years later

Her eyes decode the piano’s DNA, see beyond it,

Forgets McCarthy, forgets McNamara,

Sees below the bass, exposes the music raw

Filleting it, splaying its flesh on ivory.

Her fingers bleed on the keys and

She grows younger with every chord.

Tiffany

Tiffany

She was mummifying Barbies

the day I met her,

singing softly to herself,

burying platinum bodies in earth.

I sat under the crabapple tree,

crabapples falling in an uneven halo.

The first time she invited me to her house,

we dressed up like Laura Ingalls Wilder

in petticoats and tiaras.

One summer we found a cocoon in anise wood.

Budding biologists, we beat the sunset home,

emptied a liter of Coca-Cola,

inserted the leafy branch inside,

constructed the caterpillar’s castle,

our ship frozen inside a glass jug.

Embalmed dolls brushed aside,

we moved instead to fill the inanimate with life.

The orange butterfly cast off her coat days later.

We took her out to the anise field and watched

in awe as she flew out to Laura’s prairie.

Crabapples fell but did not crush the glowing halo.

Spinning

Spinning*

Michelle and I are playing tornado

in the backyard when Dad comes home early,

before Mom calls set the table,

and Dad pulls us into his lap.

We giggle because Dad has foxtails stuck

in his socks and a flower pinned under one ear

and Dad is an engineer.

None of this matters once he flips open

his vintage lunchbox,

and inside we don’t see this morning’s

turkey-avocado but a black rabbit

the size of two five-year-old hands.

It eyes four wagging ponytails

and four invading palms

as the tornados are forgotten.

Late afternoon light highlights only

what is still green and what is black,

we race around yelping because

we’ve got new overalls and a

brand new bunny to parade around like

we drew him ourselves,

wishing Teacher would pin him up on the

chalkboard so everyone would know

that he is ours, the world is green,

and still unshaken from our dizzy young orbit.

---

* published on firstwriter.com, summer 2006

For the Sun

For the Sun

every night as a child I would stand on the

splinter-strewn balcony and squint my eyes

in search of you

I longed to unhook your yellow curtain

that tied you to the distant hills,

let your precious golds and reds and magentas

pour down enriching color

onto the quilt-stitched fields,

building-studded city streets,

onto each bald and hairy head

every night as a child I was startled

when you eased down that slippery horizon,

locking yourself into the abyss

leaving me alone in the blue-blackness

to discover the moon