The waitress says she is no longer Cuban. You were once married to a Cuban, but
you see no need to mention it. You order the Farmer’s Omelet and you will
probably slide your home fries onto my plate without discussion. Kids in a back
booth play a game with their uncle’s glass eye. On the wall-mounted TV, pods
of orcas circle TV crews on boats and will continue until after nightfall. Researches
will discuss their complicated, clumsy, mouthy emotions. I don’t realize I’ve
been given the wrong order until I’ve already started in, and the TV shows
a mother orca and her calf. One interviewer smiles awkwardly at a marine biologist,
who is crying. Gas prices have been dropping, though, and we’ve avoided most
of this season’s hurricanes. We order more coffee. Two snowmobilers enter
the diner and stomp the outside off of their feet. I recognize one of them from
high school, but memory need not act once its eyes have blinked awake. And we ought
to tip the waitress, who is at the end of her shift, and whose bus will arrive at
its stop shortly. And there is a wait, I imagine—a growing line waiting for
us to finish, just finish, bring the rest home in a bag.
Because one religion works to defeat another. Because it is not the nature of the
State to allow others. Rubble. Something that was once a marketplace. Partial wall
of a partition, roads that lead only to rock piles. Because one has bronze and the
other has iron. A field of horse bones. A grand staircase attached to nothing. Dog
carcasses in a mound, near the skeleton of a church, shards of stained glass scattered
about the dry soil. Because one archduke insulted another. Because one Emir went
syphilitic and land-hungry. A falconer’s empty coop, empty carts missing wheels,
old women living in abandoned goat stalls. Because it’s what we do. Because
it is the Lenten season. Soldiers marching the main road, some without shoes. Rat
hoards. Because strength is weakness. And for the sake of posterity. And for the
hell of it.
—Previously published in Full of Crow (October 2013);
reprinted here by author’s permission
Gertrude off a bridge. Mathilda on a train track. And all of her children, save
one, dead by twenty. The last time I ate blackberries was in 1775, crisp taste of
change in the air. Grandmother cooked squirrel meat in gravy and served it over
thick noodles. My sisters, Rheinlanders, continue to run from the ghost of a drowned
uncle. Amsterdam. Ipswich. Aunt Winnifred. Grandfather Eudes. The first time I ate
blueberries was a century ago. I arrived in a large steamship from Fredrikstad.
I came to research lineage and to fight as a mercenary. Epke at the gallows. Hendrik
by the rope. It is true we have weak stomachs and defiant livers. Christians with
sticky fingers. Welshmen with gluttonous appetites for sins of the flesh. Obsessive
compulsion from the Swedes. Gout from the Frisians. I am following my lost uncles.
Forgive me for leaving, satchel of stolen, bruised fruit, swung over my shoulder.
I have heard there is a large, new world worth visiting.
Once, there was a blue Bonneville parked outside. And pines. No eviction notice
was sent. Next door, the TV repairman and his sad wife. Across the street, a widow
with walls of fading pictures and misaligned wallpaper stripes. And evergreens out
front. It was summer, then it was fall. It was loneliness, then it was hustle and
bustle. Once, the Mr. Chips truck parked in the widow’s driveway. The mailman
worked slowly. Once, there were several owls nesting in the eaves of a storm-shuttered
roof. One clothesline for three families. Grandkids on weekends making a mess of
crumbling curb-ends. Air thick with obituary slumber. Time is a sore loser. Even
memory is sepia-toned. Pale mailboxes with bent red metal flags. Birdbaths moldy
with autumn’s divorcee leaves. Downed wires. Once, Christmas decorations hung
in windows until March. Now, the hollowed-out cul-de-sac sinks, resigned foundations
going weak, septics backing up. Time. All the yellowed junk mail adrift in the breeze.
The ground a carpet of crisp, orange needles. Squirrels in the backyard sheds. The
drafty windows are widows, now, too. Air thick and duo-toned. It was fall, then
it was winter.
And here, a story about our war,
told with a reasonable care.
A Jiggedy Jig and a Bumbley Bumb.
TV viewers are captive tenants
to councils, parliaments, and senates.
Bippity Boo and Dippity Dum.
Suicide blasts and no-fly zones.
Bags of bodies and boxes of bones.
Glibbity Glee and Glibbity Goo.
Between commercial breaks, blood.
Woulds, and coulds, and a should.
Lickity Split and Speckley Moo.
There is no end to this, our wars.
A Muckity Muck and a Globbity Gore.
is a writer and teacher living in Southern New Jersey. He works for The Geraldine
Dodge Foundation’s Poetry Program and for Murphy Writing of Stockton College.
Other poems have appeared in journals such as 2Rivers Review, Crack the Spine,
and Shot Glass Journal.