Depth of Field

 

 

We’re retold the stories of our lives

by the time we reach Buffalo,

sun coming up diffuse and prehistoric

over the Falls.

 

A white morning,

sun like paint on the windshield.

You drive, smoke, wear sunglasses.

 

Rochester, Camera Capitol of America.

Stubbing a cigar in the lid of a film canister,

the Kodak watchman gives directions.

 

The museum’s a wide-angle mansion.

You search the second storey from the lawn,

mentally converting bathrooms to darkrooms.

 

A thousand photos later,

exhausted by second-guessing

the mind which invisibly surrounds each image,

we nap in a high school parking lot,

sun leaning low as the trees

over the roof of the warm car.

 

Driving home.  The moon’s so big and close

I draw a moustache on it and smudge the windshield.

 

I stick my fingers in your collar to keep you awake.

I can’t remember a thing about our lives before this morning.

 

We left our city at night and return at night.

We buy pineapple and float quietly through the neighbourhood,

thick trees washing themselves in lush darkness,

or in the intimate light of the streetlamps.

In summer the planet’s heavy with smells of us,

stung with the green odour of gardens.

Heat won’t leave the pavement

until night is almost over.

 

I’ve loved you all day.

We take the old familiar Intertwine Freeway,

begin the long journey towards each other

as to our home town with all its lights on.

 

 

Lake of Two Rivers

 

                “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory…

                         records in order to forget.”

                                                                        —JOHN BERGER

 

   1

 

Pull water, inhook its seam.

 

Lie down in the lake room,

in the smell of leaves still sticky from their birth.

 

Fall to sleep the way the moon falls

from earth: perfect lethargy of orbit.

 

   2

 

Six years old, half asleep,

a traveler.  The night car mysterious

as we droned past uneasy twisting fields.

 

My father told two stories on these drives.

One was the plot of Lost Horizon,

the other: his life. 

This speeding room, dim in the dashboards green emission,

became the hijacked plane carrying Ronald Colman to Tibet,

or the train carrying my father across Poland in 1931.

 

Spirit faces crowded the windows of a ’64 Buick.

Unknown cousins surrounded us, arms around each other,

a shawl of sleeves.

 

The moon fell into our car from Grodno.

It fell from Chaya-Elke’s village,

where they stopped to say goodbye.

 

His cousin Mashka sat up with them

in the barn, while her face

floated down the River Nerman in my father’s guitar.

He watched to remember

in the embalming moonlight.

 

   3

 

Sensate weather, we are your body,

your memory.  Like a template,

branch defines sky, leaves

bleed their gritty boundaries,

corrosive with nostalgia.

 

Each year we go outside to pin it down,

light limited, light specific,

light like a name.

 

   *

 

For years my parents fled at night,

loaded their children in the back seat,

a tangle of pajamas anxious to learn the stars.

 

I watched the backs of their head

until I was asleep, and when I woke

it was day, and we were in Algonquin.

 

I’ve always known this place,

familiar as a room in our house.

 

The photo of my mother, legs locked in water,

looking into the hills where you and I stand—

only now do I realize

it was taken before I was born.

 

   *

 

Purple mist, indefinite hills.

 

At Two Rivers, close as branches.

Fish scatter, silver pulses with their own electric logic.

 

Milky spill of moon over the restless lake,

seen through sieve of foliage.

 

In fields to the south

vegetables radiate underground,

displace the earth.

While we sit, linked by firelight.

 

   4

 

The longer you look at a thing

the more it transforms.

 

My mother’s story is tangled,

overgrown with lives of parents and grandparents

because they lived in one house and among them

remembered hundreds of years of history.

 

This domestic love is plain, hurts

the way light balancing objects in a still life hurts.

 

The heart keeps body and spirit in suspension,

until density pulls them apart.

When she was my age

her mother had already fallen through.

 

Pregnant, androgynous with man,

she was afraid.  When life goes out,

loss gets in, wedging a new place.

 

Under dark lanes of the night sky

the eyes of our skin won’t close,

we dream in desire.

 

Love wails from womb, caldera, home.

Like any sound, it goes on forever.

 

   *

 

The dissolving sun turns Two Rivers into skin.

Our pink arms, slightly fluorescent,

hiss in the dusky room, neon tubes bending

in the accumulated dark.

 

Night transforms the lake into a murmuring solid.

naked in the eerie tremor of leaves rubbing stars,

in the shivering fermata of summer,

in the energy of stones made powerful by gravity,

desire made powerful by the seam between starlight and skin,

we join, moebius ribbon in the night room.

 

   5

 

We do not descend, but rise from our histories.

If cut open, memory would resemble

a cross-section of the earth’s core,

a table of geographical time.

Faces press the transparent membrane

between conscious and genetic knowledge.

A name, a word, triggers the dilatation.

Motive is uncovered, sharp overburden in a shifting field.

 

   *

 

When I was twenty-five I drowned in the River Neman,

fell through when I read that bone-black from the ovens

was discarded there.

 

Like a face pressed against a window,

part of you waits up for them,

like a parent, you wait up.

 

   *

 

A family now, we live each other’s life

without the details.

 

The forest flies apart, trees are shaken loose

by my tears,

 

by love that doesn’t fall to earth

but bursts up from the ground, fully formed.

 

          -from Oranges