The Pitfalls of Enlightenment
My family plays a game
called Pitch in which,
from a draw of six cards, we bid
on suspected combinations for success.
Whichever cards go uncalled are pitched.
So, say the bid’s winner calls spades,
the table is soon littered with diamonds, hearts
before everyone’s cards are returned to six.
Then, each hand must follow suit,
forced to allow what was dealt to play out.
Strongest working theory: your worst relationships
can be traced to the emotional map
created in childhood. You replay
and replay, they say, the same hand.
My mother plays a subtle game, with
a certain hesitation. My father usually
refused to play. Uncle Jim is famous
for bidding without giving his cards a glance.
It is a rite of passage
to learn the game, to take your seat
and study your partner across
the folding table. Inheritance
of how to lose, how to sneak a win.
In romance, psychologists say,
we seek a return to the stability
of earliest memory. If with any luck
it seemed sturdy, a childhood
filled with Adirondacks …
Dear first date: delegate disaster
and ask me everything —
I’ll tell you how my first love was for trespass,
tell you what I found under the floorboard,
unguarded, the pitfalls of enlightenment.
No, I’ll tell you what I left there, under the house’s
closed eyes. No, I’ll tell you something else,
with a kiss. When we win big in Pitch,
polite demeanor gives way —
five or more generations have laid down
the last of their cards with zeal
and howled it to the living room lights:
High, Low, Jick-jack-jinny, and the Game!
It’s luck you’re really after, luck
without end. Everything else
should be pitched. Imagine
a future built like this,
persistent surrender that lasts
well into the night. When
after a brief pause the cards are
inevitably shuffled, redealt, call it a new day.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Imagining His Final Hours
or Just Like a Dream, You’re Here With Me
When my father slunk back from his exile
an ice shelf appeared on the news dripping
sweat, descending a glacial staircase of spot-lit embarrassment.
What never happened: his hourglass silhouette, a silent opera.
From there, life unfolded in a hospital ward,
all clipboards and antiseptic, all undulations and Styrofoam.
Meanwhile, our vocabularies evolved: condition, process, matter of time.
The elevator of our love ferried an orange, colorless disaster
to the gift shop — sign language sings its furs, its pelts. We felt the blows.
Nine times a day, there were windows.
The crystalline tongue of my mother, the obstinate half-moons
my sister studied at the ends of her body.
He began to ask us questions in return. We answered
with shredded shirts, the long-haired knees of blue jeans.
The pocked and frozen undulations of Styrofoam.
As though a fly, he survived a thousand shooing arms, he lived in exit.
He was almost wise, though serene could not describe him.
At his funeral, he commanded the dusty icebergs
of our childhood. My mother’s tongue sugared rivers
of sleep. My sister threw open one window
and then another. Window
after window, until the fact cleared up dramatically
and, satisfied, she too let lunacy sleep.
Up to now, she has slept for many silver years.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Go On
Under the ground, new languages to which
we are tourists. The same
inside my own body — though the swell is ever-gentle,
these busy lagoons keep me laughing, going.
Time was of course invented
so that we would.