The weight we carry is
like ghosts of the past.
Me: my mother screaming
to the sky
consolidated it all for me:
her grandmother knew she
couldn't have another kid, no money
(my mother told me recently)
and died terribly in that illegal abortion, 1906,
she wanted everything
for my grandmother and her sister.
But my mother thought she could do it
but was wrong, she couldn't
handle it without the village,
the village we never had growning up, or we had
but kept leaving it all behind.
My Dad carrying the weight,
the Kansas sun where everything grows so tall,
born to devout parents also both footloose
but settled in Florida, another tropical country,
so far away from Greenich Village,
though Carl Sandberg did come to visit
Winter Park once and sang songs all night long.
A justice warrior, the town of Eakinsville a few miles
away (the only African American incorporated town
in America) my grandmother campaigned against
the KKK (remembering bloody Kansas?)
and her sister Theresa was a missionary in Africa.
So my father became a civil rights worker
at Quaker work camps. His father
an unknown poet & teacher,
(rhyming was out of style)
must of felt anger caged in,
he says they didn't get along
and he ran away a few times
to Uncle Warren's (who became a corporate
lawyer in DC later and gave me 10 dollars
in a wallet, but I didn't keep it).
The intensity glowing I picked up on it somehow,
went to Fla to live at 20 years, to live in that house,
all the books and orange trees,
my Grandmother like an angel combing
long grey hair 100 times every morning.
A little log cabin out back
where I'd read my Whitman.
I wanted to breathe the air
in that haunted house but went crazy
from Woodrose seeds in my belly, floating,
and just had to come back to Philly.
To Richard and Maria and our nothing to do
life but carry that unknown weight.
'Change the world' means nothing comparitively.
Am I seeing already in only a few pages
of the Murakami book 'Dance, Dance, Dance"
what he means?
Everyone is born into the weight they carry
choosing rightly or wrongly,
smelling it out at a young age.
And then later, looking back
can discern that weight
and how they chose to carry it.
Its not about being someone at all.
Its about carrying well.
That moment in a backyard cemented a deal
between the sky and me, my little brother
I now see, watching me watch my sister
go to mother screaming and comfort her.
This is the last piece in the puzzle:
my mother relating to me recently,
oh about a year ago, that
her father and mother fought a lot,
terrible fights i discerned from between
her words.
I don't think she reconciled with her father
(a terrible bone cancer, painful, during
the end of her college years), because
she doesn't see she might
reconcile with me about the weight.
Doesn't notice within my words.
Reconciliation Needed should be
the title of this poem.
That's my family for you,
holding the weight
UP.
My father perhaps the best
with deep prayer. But he's the least
with connected thoughts, or ideas. The best way
to think of it is as
if every family is haunted
by the past decisions of the ancestors.
Not a bad thing if there's some conversation there
that holds water.
Anger as daggers growing
in my feet, claws that want to propel
me for miles, spring loaded calves
good for my tai chi floating.
I float to dream.
Like our cats have claws
in all four limbs
I've been having a cat fight with the living Earth
for too many years, I want to ride here on out
like Sumi rides on my shoulders, she's queen
of me when she's riding my horse.
We float together from room to room.
Looking for the weight of purpose,
the kitchen holds it all, my appetite
is too much, especially when I'm in the rocker,
watching tv, commenting on the plot,
detective series, not sure how many episodes
are left. The cleanest ones start with
a dead body and the detective is interrupted
from their daily mundane,
or perhaps from sleep.
But at least perhaps the horrible violence
has already been done, but perhaps not.
and so the weight like a point in time
and a wave form perhaps seemingly from nowhere.
And some say that tragedy is how humans learn,
always the wound, someone's opening another
Pandora's box right now.
The lesson of not getting along.
I was a long distance runner
as a kid training for this.
Large heart capacity to span
the generations of faces.
And so when I look into Jessie's face
I see her seeing depths
she doesn't know yet.
No one knows their own face,
what it holds, the people they've seen
who've seen beloved faces who've seen
faces.
Fooled by motion pictures to think
that person knows, we watch them endlessly
NOT know yet what they know.
We wish to help them hold it all and should be
helping ourselves. I help Jessie, she already helps me hold
it all and put it down, a stone bench
in the back yard for Jeb, my younger brother
who has passed on.
Weight and purpose, my brother
and her husband, seriously.
We can say the words 'death' or 'passing',
'left us', the 'great beyond'. I saw
how light hearted Richard was
before going on, the day before
the day before the morning of. His
last words something like
'That Sue, she's a good one.' to the nurse,
and no we're not afraid
of talking about the ancestors
looking down over us,
the only ones who have earned their opinions.
The most difficult task to discern and
then to talk about, the ancestor's commands
on a sunny day in Hartford.
I should change the name of this
long form poem then.
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