Originally published by the Minnesota Writers Edited by Charles Waterman
Copyright © 1992 by Michael Finley.
Published a second time
Publishing House, 1978
All rights reserved.
Wednesday, March 30, 1994,
for the Excelsior Poetry Meeting Group,
Excelsior, Minnesota.
WHERE BIRDS FARE WELL
Swallow on telephone lines,
Doves in the underbrush,
Hawks in ruins and cathedral rafters,
Crows on the shoulders of fallen soldiers,
Peacocks on staircases,
Canaries in the offices of motel managers,
Parrots in rich women's kitchens,
Whip poor wills sobbing
in the branches of trees
on long summer nights.
Sparrows on rooftops, in hedges and haylofts,
Eagles ensconced atop immaculate mountains,
Herons in marshes,
Swans in canals and in fountains,
Skylarks sing into the sun,
Owls in cemeteries,
And cuckoos in the heads
of young
men.
Now Then
Upon completing our educations
we planned to be cowboys
or at least the sidekicks of ones.
Everywhere I went I took pictures
with my head.
Blackberries by the roadbed.
Uncle in the garden.
I remember the boardwalk splintering
and the mirror in the barber shop breaking
and people yelling and jumping
into the river.
The car had stalled on a hill and started
rolling backwards.
I smoothed my fringe, and the mountain
in the tomato patch
grew and grew.
A MELTING POT
My mother's father didn't come over on the Titanic. A bad-tempered violent man, he lost his ticket in a pub fight. Or so I am told. He took his coffee with whiskey in it. Once he named a calf after me. Two years later he slaughtered it. I was one of his pallbearers.
My father's father was a diabetic most of his life. I remember watching him pinch a skinny shoulder and slipping the needle in. He was sweet by nature. A neighbor's son ran wild with a Model T once and killed my grandfather's favorite riding horse, a saddlebred stallion. Grandpa paid to fix the broken ca. I remember when I was a boy and dropped by toothbrush into the toilet, he picked it out for me and washed it off. I dreamed of him once bursting into a fountain, his life shooting out all the holes he'd made.
In 1959 my mother is driving home late from her waittressing job. A stag bolts from the roadside into her beams. That night I hear voices, see a deer hung from an apple tree by the heels. Bread knife in hand, I see my father make the downward incision. The great heart tumbles onto the fallen fruit.
My father and mother's first baby was sick, and the two stayed together until she died. My mother went a little mad, in advance of the loss. My father went out, for a drink, or a dance. Sometimes he came home drunk and the two of them shouted. One time he hit her, and I hugged her leg on a bunched up carpet and cried.
My father told my mother that her mother was an imbecile, but that is not how I remember her. I see my grandmother's hands zipping open pale skin, and with one hand pulling the unborn egg into the light. Inside the hen the shell was still soft.
On television men are spading up other men from a California peach orchard. My mother says my uncle John was one of the dead, he had left home and lost touch.
Two thousand miles away my father stirs his ice. He is looking at album with women and girls in it. Their names are Grace and Ruth and Rose and Mary. more beautiful than any I have seen, the way the light and shadow plays on their faces, the rosy cheek turned bronze, their hopes and smiles, gone into time. Someone ought to tell the story, says my father. Somehow it ought to be all gotten down.
A dozen families flee from famine to drought and depression to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The branches of the trees intertwine in the pure product of our broken household, the girl upstairs, coughing in her sleep, the woman fretting to put things right, the man slipping through the boards like spilled water.
My mother's father, deep into Michigan, who married old and knew no more about Jesus than his druid roots, beats his daughters and sets them howling. Deep into summer they hack the milkweeds, head upon head. Something happened, I don't know what. My mother grew up anxious, as if she had a long head start on the sick child inside her.
My father's mother is on a nursing home bed in Milwaukee with a stroke. She is 85, I am 24. When she sees me, she thinks I am my cousin, my uncle, my father. How are my children? The poor sick girl? The boy who went away to seminary? In my grandmother's heart I live freely and all at once through four and five generations.
My cousins drive me to my motel room. They talk about senility, psychosis, the stroke. I half listen. My grandmother is right in ways I will have trouble remembering. We swirl together in a pot of blood, bodies passing through one another, forward, backward into time. I will not see her alive again.
Rachel the Student
In the lab there was a cat.
Its head was shaved bare,
and sticking out of a wad of putty
was a wire.
When the cat saw Rachel come in, it jumped.
But it didn't land on all fours,
as most cats do.
It hit a cabinet drawer and fell on its side.
And Rachel wants to know what good is a cat
like that.
Every day she bikes by the cancer hospital,
chain grease blackening her pant legs.
Today she looked and a face in a window
was looking out at her,
then pulled the drapes shut.
A big exam is on the way
and she's missed her period
and her neighbor upstairs plays the saxophone
late at night,
and nothing she says makes any difference.
I don't understand it,
she starts crying one day,
why do people want to be mothers.
THE CLARINET IS
A DIFFICULT INSTRUMENT
I was eating minestrone
when I heard something fall
outside my apartment window.
Too dark to see much
but a pair of hairy arms slam shut
a window on the third floor
of the building opposite mine.
In the morning all I found
was a bent clarinet on cement,
dented horn and pawn shop sticker
saying nine dollars.
It reminded me of the French explorer
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
He too had dreams, set sail
up the St. Lawrence, looking for China,
and wound up settling in Detroit instead.
NOT FAR FROM THE BEACH
AT PLUM ISLAND
Here the ocean makes its ocean-sound,
like the sound of a freight train at night
or the sound the freeway makes
outside my window in Minneapolis.