“OK you guys, the clean-up song is on! Let’s work together to clean up as quick as possible so we can read the next chapter of Matilda!”

The 5 children that were in the room on that Wednesday afternoon jumped into motion. Some were reluctantly dismantling prized Transformers made out of Lego, others were sorting the two types of Lego—bigger ones into a round, cylindrical  tube, and smaller ones into a plastic container with a “Lego” label on it.  D’Niko, a blond boy with a shaved head, screams with a voice too big for his puny body.

“ANTHONY!!! Does it matter which box the Legos go in?”

“Yeah, I guess it does, since they’re different .”

“SEE? I TOLD you, Marangeli. Stupid.”

Marangeli, a lanky blond with expressive green eyes, frowns, sulks, and looks around dejected, without responding verbally.

I wonder how to address the complex exchange of emotions that have arisen. I’ve told D’Niko hundreds of times that put-downs are not OK. He’s acknowledged it, apologized thousands of times, thought of his own consequences and acted upon them. I’ve had hundreds of conversations with Marangeli about standing up for herself and not allowing people to treat her with disrespect. What else can I do?

By now, the children are assembling at the meeting area.

“I’m done cleaning,” Shamar says, rolling around on the floor by my feet, looking up at me.

“Oh, really? I still see Legos in the play area and some other—-“

Before I can finish the sentence Marangeli and Jaden, a tall, rotund boisterous child with a Chris Brown mohawk jumped to clean up before the words could leave my mouth.

“I see something white. Oh, and something blue, too. And what about that garbage?” I say from my teacher seat at the meeting area.

I look at Marangeli’s face. A smirk has replaced her frown—she feels happy to helpful and seems to have forgotten about the put down doled out to her before. But I haven’t. What do I do about what happened? How do I teach children how to treat each other with respect and how do I teach children how to demand respect?

The entire class of five looks about ready to begin our read aloud.

“What’s going to happen in Matilda today?” D’Niko asks.

I still don’t know how to proceed but it feels like the conversation that I would have with them will go in vain.

I look at Marangeli. I look at D’Niko. They don’t seem to care. It took me so long to get them settled, can I really afford to spend more time talking about this?

“Well, yesterday we read…”

Justice silenced.

Image: MaganRae, Justice

Storytelling and the Years After

What happened to your lost stories?
Even with fine wax wings they
disappear from the horizon. A white limb, a
ripple on the sea. Remember Icarus.

Daedalus must have wondered at the
round breasted partridge
perched on a low limb chattering,
rustling short spanned wings as it
watched him bury his only son.

Enter Ovid’s telling. Inside, you’ll meet
Perdix, boy inventor who fashioned
tools of teeth and bones.
Daedalus, murderous builder of labyrinths
cast him off a precipice
(still clutching his prototype?)

Saved by metamorphosis…
Pallas, champion of the clever,
transformed his flailing arms to
wings that broke his fall.

Unsignificantly,
an umber bird perches on a low limb in
Brueghel’s landscape. It’s the
tale that invented Schadenfreude.

Listen to your story, a June bug
hurling its thick brown body at your window.
Inside the living room of forgetfulness the
thud and scrape jars you awake.

You didn’t believe me about the June bug.
Its name is as pert as a toddler’s
sundress but every year it
crashes toward your light,
calling you out into the night or
driving you under cover.

Drop those twine-bound bales of
notebooks crammed with words no
eyes will fall upon ever.

When words cease—
quivering, restless, immobile, the
volume fallen behind the shelf is the
very one you’ll need.

Go outside. Now is the fertile time.
Stretch out your arms, allow the air to
move through you. Stories will
streak across the sky. Let them fly
toward the sun. Watch them land like
birds on a wire.

photo: jim moran

I Love You, Now

Through heavy air and little shade, I weave a course with my mother through the tented fields of a thousand vendors.  Some tents have electricity with tiny fans whirring or radio speakers playing faint tinny jazz, but most do not, and the dealers in these tents look overheated and a bit helpless as they watch us pass over their antique wares.  I’m searching for something to hang on the wall of my new apartment.  It’s the first time that I have my own space, and I am determined to find something to define it.

I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, but I am confident that I will know when I find it.  As I am hunting through piles of old photographs and framed board game boxtops, the proprietor tries to sell me on a chromolithograph of Othello.  He tells me that it must sing to me.  He means that I should buy what I am drawn to.  That I should listen to my heart.  And if I hear singing I should pay him $650 for the print.

My mother tries to help the best she can and whispers loudly that I can haggle if I like it.  I make a face, and we move along to another tent.  Each field is full of vendors; some have set up their shops like fancy boutiques and others like garage sales or dumping grounds.  Finding treasure and making deals is part of the sport, my mother says, holding up a framed flag with 48 stars, trying to read my mind.  She did well a few years ago buying me a light-up, backlit Jesus, which became the first piece of my deity wall: a clutter of gods and idols including Christ the carpenter, Hanuman, Odin, Makhala, Shiva, several Buddhas, and a dirty mirror in a gaudy gold-leaf frame.

I’m sure that I’ll know when I find it, and, sure enough, I do.  Something sings to me.  It’s a 1938 panoramic shot of the United Mine Workers of America standing on the steps of some building in Washington D.C.  A sea of miners.  It reminds me of an old song sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford that I played on repeat for two years without stopping – first on big headphones, then on the guitar while singing with my eyes closed, wishing I was a lizard in the spring.  ”When I come over the hill with a forty dollar bill…”  There’s something about the faces in the photo, the namelessness, the crowdedness, the fullness.  It sings.

I hear another voice, too: my father’s singing about the fall of the slate.  He always sang folk songs with me before my bedtime when I was a little boy, and they were always about dying or losing your parents or your heart breaking.  Little Moses, Rank Stranger, Dark As A Dungeon. They were beautiful songs.  And though I was terrified – I was only seven at the time – I loved the mournful, slightly affected country honk of my father’s voice as he sang about a miner’s fear of being buried alive.  The infinite divide between me and the coal mine closed.  And just before he waltzed me off to bed, the dungeon world became very real – this imagined place for me to consider loneliness and my anxiety about being loved and loving.  ”I pity the miner that’s digging my bones.”  There is music and memory in this photograph of men all lined up on the D.C. steps in their fatherly shirts and ties.  There is a line of poetry that I wish I could write but that I can’t seem to find.  There is something hidden in those faces.  Three words, at least.

So, I buy the picture for fifty bucks and I carry it back to my mother’s car.  Not what she would have picked for me, but she likes the way it was shot.  Plus it was a good deal, she says.  It’s not until we’ve moved on to our next mission of finding a bridge lamp for my writing desk that she says oh and then tells me why I bought it:

“You know that your great grandparents were involved in mining.”

I did know that, vaguely.  And I’d heard that there was something about this part of the family that related to preaching, too.  About the word.  Writing.  Seven thunders.  But I have no idea what that means.  They are just scraps of a story that my uncle told at my father’s 60th birthday celebration a couple years ago, when my brother and I reserved an overnight recording session and brought a bottle of scotch and microphones, and we all told jokes and stories until we were half blind drunk and it was well past 4 AM.  It was my father, his brother, my brother, and I.  My father said something about a small mining town in Indiana and there was something else about distant relatives who loved to tell jokes and drink and have a good time, but I haven’t heard the recording and most of the memory that I have of the night is clouded.  What I remember most is laughter.  The only other time that I’ve heard about this part of the family was as a warning about alcoholism in my ancestral line.  I know almost nothing about them, and for some reason that I haven’t figured out – it feels far too complex to try to tease out here – I feel completely disconnected from most of my blood relatives.

But that wasn’t why I bought the picture.  Not what my mom said.  I bought it because it sang to me.  But now, owning a photograph of the 1938 United Mine Workers of America makes sense beyond a felt sense, and, strangely, I am glad that I can now explain my romance with living underground if someone asks: it is because I love my family, a family I know nothing about.

After my mother explained to me why I bought it, she remembered that she had some old things in the attic that I might like to take back to New York.  There was a painting of an old battleaxe that had been my grandmother’s mother, and I could have it if she could find it.  Later, rooting around the attic together, we discovered more family treasures: portraits of my mother as a child, drawings my brother did of stick figures and motorcycles, and a photograph of an older gentleman with piercing blue eyes.  This was my great grandfather, Norval.  The only thing I know with any confidence about Norval is that my name comes from the first letter of his name, and that I’m thankful that that is as far as it goes.  He is mostly a myth in my mind, a tangle of stories that I’ve collected from my father, his brother, and my grandparents, when they were alive.  He taught himself law by reading as an editor somewhere.  He would have become the Governor if he hadn’t gone to jail for forging a check.  When he was 35, he married a woman half his age who was the daughter of a poor mining family that literally lived on the other side of the tracks in Sullivan, Indiana.  I had never seen a photo of him before.  And seeing him now, I was surprised that he was human.

I piled the photo with the rest of the things that I wanted to take with me.  I would have to ask my father for permission to take it.  It was one of the only photographs of Norval that the family still had.  When my father saw it that evening, he told me that I should call his aunt Mary Ann to learn about who Norval was.  And I still plan on phoning her, even though it’s now midnight and three days after the deadline has passed for submitting this writing.

I need to finish soon.  I know this story is too long to read, and maybe it’s not even so readable – a tangle of thoughts, some scraps of memory, a few intelligible notes from songs I used to sing.  But maybe that’s how stories work: you find yourself in the space between words and make sense from what you know.  I don’t know much about my name or where it comes from, and I don’t know what makes the world sing to me or even where my place in it is.  Often, I feel lost.  Like I’m tied to this bundle of things that I can’t call my own – carrying myself through a jumbled world that exists somewhere between history and remembrance.  And I don’t know why, but I haven’t found much of a reason to name it, to define it, to call it something.  I doubt very much that there’s a purpose to anything.  It’s not like I think that I was led by providence through that field to the photograph of miners to the stories with my parents to the profound love that I have now discovered for my family.  I don’t.  But there’s something beautiful about my name now that I never noticed before.  Now it means something new.  Now I realize that my name was a gift given to me by my family, and, through writing, I have unwrapped its stories to discover what’s inside.

Rosary Bead, South Netherlandish, Early 16^th Century

To carve a world in a nutshell…

a dream is something
like this—a thing to
pin you to your seat, impel you
forward—whatever the movement to
match the task. Tonight the
friar bends in dim light, ink
thickens on the quill.
Singular devotion yields a

boxwood rosary bead a
revelation to fit your
palm, unfolding the whole
story etched in a hinged orb
alleluia. Believe

me, in a museum atop Manhattan
Island surrounded by unicorns a
macular miracle how the thing was made
candles flicker in the dark,
passing the night in stone walls
damp with December pressing in.

With mercy toward the mouse
who’d tucked into a beeswax feast,
he brought broken hosts after
Vespers to save his
wax for much needed illumination,
light of the world two and one

quarter inches in diameter
Adam and Eve cast from the garden,
Gabriel visiting Mary,
farewells in Gethsemane, torment on
Calvary, rolling away the stone,
crowned on heavenly throne, a
dark stain where blade

opened Monk’s thumb, a wound
to mark the Matins page before
weak winter sun leaks through
leaded panes and
still the world goes on.

Originally published in Quantum Poetry

Candy

photo: g daddy

On a shore of broken bricks,
time of thorns and reeds.

Rusting iron, fretwork of cracks
in sheet ice, the gnawed jawbone

of the year.  Things seen and
unseen: Adirondack waters threading

down past dumps and mill towns,
out to the Narrows, sturgeons dreaming,

armored in deepest currents.  Salamander
sleeps, heron sleeps, time smooths the stones

of sleep, weathered wooden ladder
to the sky.  Small-pawed tracks slip

into dense thicket, red flash of cardinal,
winterberry.  A grinding of ice shards,

old snow underfoot, aged sheet of plastic,
yellowed and translucent as seal bladder.

Almost a violation to be breathing.
Gulls coast the river’s elbow,

skeins of geese bark their way south,
and the body knows how brittle the bone is.

Port Ewen, NY

photo: Alison Koffler

i had guts
you could see feel
pushing through my navel
reaching outside
of self
an umbilical hernia
then i broke my right hand
my dominant hand
it was my first semester teaching
i had to write on the chalkboard
there was no sweet kid
no eager scholarly scribe
i had a thesis to write
i had to type
helpless

however the keys proved to have more utility
than any other writing implement
my pained taps didn’t have to be exact
clumsy keystrokes became perfect print
my signature indelible in content
not      shape
unlike my futile attempts to negotiate my grip with pen

while maintaining an illogical fear of technology
paradoxically, i appreciate typing
as i move toward bodilessness
a side effect of emotional paralysis
when i discovered my grave dependence on my right hand
and gut
cut to piece me back together
i began to be free
of form

my father     demigod
draconian in diet
built body as armor
cherished and chiseled his flesh
Adonis
this mythical man
morphed into mortal
cannot run
cannot walk
cannot sit
cannot feed himself
yet somehow has retained strength to utter
perceptibly laborious speech
followed by hopeful gasps and impromptu naps

his body betrayed him
his hands cannot hold
i remember when, for that stint in time,
i was ever so slightly incapacitated
i lost my grasp
broken

i am divorcing body
it has been unstable, unfaithful

my Mother signs my birthday cards
from my Dad
my handwriting has transformed into
illegible, desperate characters unfamiliar to me

i want my words without body
i am
post
pen

Photo: Manuel W.

Where Did You Put the Booze?

I was at school learning English and American history,
Geometry, and theology that drew me closer to mystery
Mom was at St. Mary’s, teaching another recalcitrant fifth grade
Thinking about groceries, heating oil and the scant money she made
While you haunted our home, Hamlet’s ghost with old armor and nothing to lose
Pursued by the question that sounds like betrayal, where’d you put the booze?

Your once envied career in the movie business had fallen to tatters
But instead of job hunt, you slowly slid down the ladder.
I’d do the same. At fifty–five, all grey and ashamed
Hat in hand, feeling a failure, you could hardly be blamed.
Your friends dead or absent, no gentlemanly option, nowhere to move,
There’s always one surefire exit line, where’d you put the booze?

I loved you so deeply; another god would have given me stigmata.
I did everything I could to make you a proud father
And mourned over my failures to redeem you, my shortcomings and loses,
Like a debt-ridden gambler cries at Belmont over slow horses,
And corrected each fault I could find without extenuation or excuse
But your questions were more specific, where’d you put the booze?

Looming in my brain is the illogical, sad truth that you loved me too
That you would have bled, died, pauperized the world for me; it’s true.
But the battles you’d seen, even Monte Cassino and Salerno, inspired less fear
Than the answer your confused teenage son wanted to hear:
That you’d put your family above every bright label and were willing to choose
Us over a carefully secreted bottle, but first, where’d you put the booze?

The love there was carefully hidden, but present, I know
You best taught me what’s real is abiding, but unlikely to show.
In attic, in basement, in washing machine, in amongst the dog food
In kitchen cabinet, in bathroom hamper, behind the oil burner so crude
Under the t.v., in with my books, in the wall in the den where the panelling’s loose
A search for the great truth always starts with this: Where’d you put the booze?

Photo: Portrait of Charlie Jacobs, Charlie’s Tavern, New York, N.Y., between 1946 and 1948, Library of Congress