How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) Read online

  limits, the steel-flanked beasts shrieking by

  in their pitched stampede, we had our shave,

  my resolute mother-in-law and I, so close. To Erice.

  Our headstones might read: These ladies had intentions.

  XIV. Palermo

  La nonna cammina, she walks

  through the hectoring fish-scale

  cobble of the street market.

  We are here to find her father

  who cast off from this rocky island

  a hundred years ago, hoping

  to join his father on a Rocky

  Mountain railroad crew, arriving

  just in time for the burial cairn

  of stones piled up beside the half-

  laid track. Orphaned at twelve

  in a roughneck camp, illiterate,

  perseverant as a stone himself,

  he labored the rest of his days

  to bring what remained of his clan

  to a new world. What could he

  have left behind? No family hearth

  or tilled valley; Palermo was

  a village then, has spent the years

  churning up fields and cottages,

  growing tall buildings, and nothing,

  maybe, is here for us to find—no knot

  for a daughter to grasp at the end

  of the long rope of this pilgrimage.

  Our family threads its way through

  brine-tinged morning light, a gloss

  of eggplants racked like billiards,

  long-armed men flaying anchovies

  with the efficiency of seabirds. I follow

  my husband, suddenly stirred by

  the sight of his hand on her elbow,

  steering his little rowboat of a mother

  through this bounding main. Our

  days alfresco have darkened his skin.

  He could be brother to any of these

  hawkers of Trapani salt or sardines.

  Time and again she makes him stop:

  These olives were Papa’s favorite. These

  fig garlands we always had at Christmas.

  She left this language behind at six—

  firmly, like a hangdog pet that

  followed her to the schoolroom

  door—but now the words turn up

  like found pennies under her tongue:

  Arancini, melanzana. Oh, zucca lunga!

  Impossibly long green squashes,

  thin as a schoolgirl’s arm. He grew

  these in Colorado from Sicilian seeds—

  she remembers this, and the tendrils

  he clipped each morning from the

  ends of vines that always grew back,

  brought in like bouquets for his

  freshly minted American daughters.

  Mamma boiled those with salt and

  olive oil, and that was breakfast.

  At a butcher’s stall we all pause

  to gaze at ovals of glistening flesh

  piled up like white creek stones.

  My mother-in-law has no word,

  so I ask, Che cosè? The butcher

  winks at mothers and daughters,

  points to the one man among us:

  They are the things that he has.

  We smile, embarrassed, and not

  because we surely knew. Paternity

  is the rope with no knot at its end,

  the burial cairn, the garden seed,

  the rigged mast of every ship

  that had to sail. What’s left behind

  thrusts forward. Potent Italia.

  3

  This Is How They Come Back to Us

  Burying Ground

  This cemetery is full of too much living,

  leaves of grass exhaling

  under our polished shoes,

  trees too burnished

  with copperplate autumn,

  a sky too elated today

  to revoke a touch our skin

  remembers as kin, to cast a voice still in

  our ears into the hushed ground,

  and this air, too much like breath,

  the children too wonder-struck with strange

  fortune in this ranging throng

  of cousins, their black skirts twirling

  like pinwheels over the stony lawn, bouquets

  of dark flowers hurled into sunshine.

  Hearts full afraid of the asking price.

  Too much for this day

  if this is the end of the world.

  This Is How They Come Back to Us

  —For A. R. Henry, 1898–1970

  I think of my grandfather Henry

  with a claw hammer in his hand,

  untroubled by the missing tip of

  one finger, though it worries me.

  I think of him spooning sugar on a

  slice of tomato, the white mound

  melting clear. Eating it for dessert.

  I think of the teeth that are not his

  teeth, slid forward into a bear smile

  to frighten me, and then his laughter

  that takes it all back, tooth and bear.

  I think of him asleep in a chair, arms

  crossed, as I have seen men in coffins.

  I think of him scaling the college steps

  to meet my grandmother, unashamed

  to take off his hat and show the white

  stripe above the burnished brow, the

  face of a man who works in the sun.

  I think of him young with still-perfect

  hands lifting a daughter onto a pony,

  teaching this girl to ride bareback over

  the Fox Creek hills. She is my mother,

  I am not alive, and yet I can see these

  things because my grandfather Henry

  is dead. All these parts of his life are

  equal now, the end and the beginning.

  Passing Death

  —For JoEllen Hopp Petri, 1959–2006

  For her children, this gradual dying

  is like the tests at school that leave no one behind:

  death mastered in small increments.

  Last summer they lost her laugh,

  the surprise of a marshmallow sandwich,

  jokes while she folded laundry,

  a sheet furled around the make-believe bride.

  By then we knew she wouldn’t see their weddings.

  In the fall they learned to walk the dog without her.

  Running is lost before walking,

  laughter before smiling, hope before fear.

  The tumor presses each of these

  from her mind like slick melon seeds

  squeezed out of a fist until nothing is left

  but the sticky-sweet cling of living.

  A late-afternoon light touches her sleeves

  but not her face as we sit at the table, unspeaking,

  dredging prospects without bearing.

  The bravelings whirl past us chasing the dog,

  casting their sandwiches upon the furniture.

  Their household has lost the word no.

  When we bury her, what will be left for them

  to cry over? Spilled milk, indelible stain.

  One last ounce of a mother drained away.

  The Visitation

  —For Ralph Hopp, 1922–2001

  The father, who knew how to fight

  every illness and win, a surgeon

  who reattached fingers and even noses,

  defying all the laws of tragedy we knew,

  now rests

  with unease in his chair.

  We’ve brought words

  for repairing the terms of his valor,

  but words are not his tools.

  We are guards at a pillaged vault,

  already dismissed from our day and

  night shifts but lingering

  anyway in the quiet living

  room where he hosts

  Can
cer as his guest.

  The two of them are not speaking.

  He is angry.

  It can’t be helped.

  Long Division

  —For Dante Salvatierra, 1972–2015

  According to the rules you stand alone,

  facing off against the larger number elbowed

  into its bracket: divide and conquer. But you

  would throw the bracket open, walk right in,

  persuading all those present to dance,

  leading them outside under trees to study

  on the grass of a child’s better nature. You

  would always rather add than subtract;

  would carry the one, on your shoulders if need be:

  the bully-worn muggle with untied shoelaces,

  the latchkey kids who pick every lock and find

  their true home. They’d follow you anywhere. You

  should see all these people who used to be

  third graders, gathered here to wish for one last

  thing, for the life of you. But this train has been

  coming for us all, so long. You stashed your

  absolute values in a river of children that runs

  to the sea, runs for good. Now take away one, you.

  The remainder looks impossible. How to begin

  the long division: these days ahead, all broken apart?

  Now we set our shoes to the pavement of living.

  Now you pass through the brick wall of this station

  to enter the autumn air of a better nature. You

  altogether, one hundred percent.

  My Great-Grandmother’s Plate

  —For Lillie Auxier, 1881–1965

  New Year’s morning, standing

  at the sink watching new snow drift,

  I cosset a hope that this weather might

  persist, bundling a household

  of family into one more day as mine

  before the world calls us out again.

  It whitens the woods while I weather

  a washing-up from last night’s happy ending:

  the grass-stemmed goblets, dorsal spines

  of underwater forks, and last, the white

  china platter with lattice edges, a gift

  to my great-grandmother for her wedding.

  I use this plate because I want to know

  how it might make me one with her, my hands

  slipped into hers like a pair of gloves as I lift

  and admire its fragile rim, sharing our standing

  as householders, dutiful washers of porcelain.

  But instead, a presence from behind me takes

  my shoulders, and I feel her dread of a snow

  like this for her new husband’s sake,

  a man called out to cattle in any weather;

  feel her brooding on a shuttered-up morning

  for its cost in coal. This delicate wedding

  gift might plague her for the note her mother

  will be expecting soon, along with other

  good news. A washing-up left for the morning

  would not have been her liberty. My hands

  may reach but cannot share this porcelain gift:

  the newest stake of her household,

  the oldest one in mine.

  Thank-You Note for a Quilt

  —For Neta Webb Findley, 1920–2018

  Your stitches still remind me of beans in May:

  their bowed heads emerging in perfect rows.

  Or blackberry canes that arch and fall,

  marching across the hayfield between my house

  and yours, quietly stitching our neighborhood

  into one grassy quilt for the crows to name.

  When you were a child planting lilacs here

  with your mother, did you imagine the same

  honeyed scent, eighty years later, waking

  someone like me in this house, or that we

  would sit on this porch stitching and binding

  together, or that you would finally show me

  how to fall in love with the time on my hands,

  to plant flowers to outlive me? This quilt

  is more than one of your winters, a falling-leaves

  pattern passed down. It is the bed I am still

  making up under blackberry winters come and

  gone. The grace of passing over, passing on.

  My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes

  —For Virginia Henry Kingsolver, 1929–2013

  At three in the afternoon we heard the death rattle,

  sound of a throat that can’t clear itself anymore.

  This was the cue for another drop of morphine, or not,

  according to a nurse’s advice my sister and I tried to

  reconstruct, as earnestly as we used to kneel together

  to build our fairy houses of tree bark and moss. We’d

  slept almost not at all for a week, and between us now

  constructed no clear game plan on the morphine.

  Really, death rattle was all I kept thinking. As if

  the den of this ranch house smelling of sickroom

  and dust, with its flotsam of empty Kleenex boxes,

  its rented hospital bed and oxygen machine, its frugal

  postwar windows and chronic gloom, had received

  a surprise visitor and it was Charles Dickens.

  May I say that life is filled with instructions

  we just don’t believe we are ever going to need?

  My father announced he had checks to deposit, so

  was going to the bank. My sister and I locked eyes,

  the old familiar rope of the drowning child. She

  suggested to him that he might regret his timing.

  I followed him outside. This is my family job, to say

  the ungentle thing. Taking it for the team. I yelled

  at him briefly. Then apologized. We were none of us

  quite in our minds and anyway, who was I to judge?

  As far as I knew he hadn’t spent a night or a day

  away from my mother in something like half

  a century, while I was off living my own merry life,

  had merely put it on hold for a couple of weeks

  to come and help out with the dying-at-home-

  with-no-hired-help request.

  Again I’ll step out

  of that room to warn the unwitting: it’s a big ask.

  My father came back inside. The three of us

  sat in chairs arranged like planets around our sun.

  She hadn’t spoken in days, or opened her eyes,

  yet her gravity held us. Though not completely.

  I’d noticed Dad now shifting his gaze, staring in

  love and wonder at the 12×14 portrait of my mother

  gorgeously veiled as a twenty-year-old bride, which

  he’d set on the mantel to pretty up this departure.

  The rain picked up. This storm was something else,

  some wild stampede on the roof of my childhood

  home. But she seemed shipshape, fresh cotton gown,

  no furrows of pain on the pale crepe of her brow.

  I took my phone out to the sunporch to update our

  brother. I’d barely spoken when a bolt of lightning

  struck the house. Zipped right down a metal duct

  an arm’s reach away from me. I dropped the phone.

  Took a moment. My heart, still beating.

  The house, utterly silent. The electricity had gone

  out, which made things seem peaceful.

  I remembered oxygen. That she would suffocate.

  I hurried back to the den where my sister and I

  in treble octaves discussed the emergency

  backups. Then noticed our mother was breathing

  on her own. She hadn’t done this since last winter.

  Around half-past, a shuddering little house-quake

  brought the power
back on. We breathed.

  My mother’s pulse-oxygen, measured by a device

  pinched on her finger—a number we watched

  like the basketball scores, like the polls before

  an election—had plunged to the failure zone. Now

  with machine assist she rallied back into the nineties.

  Dean’s List. All her life, that’s where she liked to be.

  This might be the moment to step one last time

  from the bedside to mention that while we spoke kindly,

  mostly, my mother and I did not love one another.

  Ever, not even when I was a baby—as I’ve lately learned

  from letters she wrote her friend from a cold plywood

  house in Annapolis where I crawled up her legs and

  drove her nuts, where she begged my two-year-old brother

  to look after me, wished Dad would come home

  from the navy and they could zoom away from us

  in their aquamarine Chevrolet.

  When women are instructed to bear children,

  we don’t think of such possibilities.

  That we are on our own here. There is no Dean’s List.

  The blessing is that later, in better times, she had

  another daughter. I cherished my sister too; it’s no fault

  of hers that lightning only strikes once. I would be

  the unspeakable first failure that stuck in my mother’s

  throat, the child who would never be gentled,

  or allowed to touch her good things, or even allowed to

  take her to lunch, but could take the rap, the bad daughter.

  However I might hold myself to the goods of my own life,

  the too-many lovers, the eventual sweet husband,

  the daughters more necessary to me than my two eyes,

  none of this could alter the daughter I was.

  But for these last weeks—

  —but for these last weeks

  while I spoon-fed my mother and crushed pain

  medicine into liquid drops on her tongue,

  did things too intimate to say—the bathing

  and changing she once did for me, that trapped

  her so terribly—through all these labors she

  seemed to be sleeping but sometimes unexpectedly

  gripped my hand, and did not zoom away.

  She left on her own recognizance. No final

  confessions, still the untroubled brow, the oxygen

  thanklessly pumping away. The rattle went quiet.

  The pulse-ox fell to zero. At some point the thunder

  had ceased, the storm passed over. I have