Square 1 by Tray Drumhann |
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My Sister Takes a Tour
by Jane Blue The contractor leads the way through our childhood rooms, painted wedding white. The house is being restored. It can’t be put back exactly the way it was. Neither can we. The leaded-windowed floor-to-ceiling china cabinets ripped out long ago, Lenox and Limoges flickering ghostly. Our grandmother’s heart was there. Later somebody nailed a plaque to a gate, etching the name of the famous man who’d lived there. He never did. He’d been dead seven years when she bought the house with her own earned money. Raised four children there, then us, our mother humiliated back home. Shadows of all of us together in that house, our mother, our aunt, two uncles; our father a stopped secret; our grandfather a solemn sepia man. She worked at a vast desk downstairs, sacrosanct, papered all over, until she died in the four-poster bed with pineapple finials, a dent where she’d saved a place for him in the thin mattress, the husband she never stopped loving, and mourning and hating for leaving her before they’d begun, the gold band and the diamonds still on her skeleton bones even now. The wainscoting, the rosewood fireplace, the high beamed ceilings remain, but the rooms are bare, and smaller somehow. Discovered April 2006, San Francisco by Jane Blue There was no skull in the treehouse, but skeletal remains with some clothing attached. The hand alone has 27 bones. Was it open or grasping? I see you motherless, I see you feral. You disappeared into the cypress, like Ceos of myth, weaving a floor of branches, enmeshing yourself, below Eagle’s Point, below the museum. Your work boots slung over limb-rafters, text books splayed open randomly, an ID in the name of Frank Pangelinan Cruz, born Oct. 7, 1943, in Guam. Your sister was looking for you, Frank, since 1984. The hollering of gulls, their silver and white bodies reeling over the Land’s End trail, over the precipice, the blue or green or gunmetal gray depths, calm, or more likely, bustling with whitecaps. You’d installed shades on your windows of air against a pelt of wind. Your ceiling the turning Zodiac or the cold wool of fog. You could have been dead for a year, your skull bouncing down to the spectacular Pacific, the plates, the closed fontanelle, the occipital bones splintering. I see you with hair like lichen, a raccoon befriending you, stealing food from the museum café, tarts with fruit glazes, half a ham sandwich on sourdough bread; the creature masked, an offering in the clawed cup of her hands. You were traced to McAllister Street but no one there could even imagine you. You were traced to the swept plain outside Petaluma where even the grasses are lonely. I’ve been there. And in the round drive of the museum, the saltfish wind and pungence of cypress. by Jane Blue A small piece of paper, wiped clean in the wash, creased. A receipt? Like a hand with mysterious life lines, an aged, crumpled face. An ancient parchment, a scientist in a lab might discern the writing, another in another lab would say something different. A tiny Agnes Martin painting, lost in a quiet room in Taos, New Mexico. White on white, either nonsense or genius. I choose genius. It is so tough, it won’t give up. They weren’t small, the Agnes Martins. This one secreted in my pocket when I wasn’t looking. By whom? A secret message like a book. You bring to it what you are. The convoluted lines of a lie. How to dispose of the body; It’s even funny, because life is messy. There’s just the tiniest tear. 
Jane Blue was born and raised in Berkeley, California. Her poems have been published in many magazines, such as Stirring, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Avatar Review, Convergence, The Chattahoochee Review, Poetry International and The Louisville Review. Her most recent books are Turf Daisies and Dandelions (Rattlesnake Press) and The Persistence of Vision (Poet’s Corner Press). She lives near the Sacramento River with her husband, Peter Rodman. |
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