by Alyda Faber
His father never the same
The neighbour’s hired hand
dead soon after war’s end
Mole-Sick
Sjen foar eagen is gjin gûchelspul.
in our family’s underground world
the tunnelling began early
detecting by feel not ask
vestigial eyes tentacle-like nose
forage under grassy skin
an “eye doctor” treats
our uncle’s surfeit
visions and voices
we assail each other
home the anxious nest
summer and winter
treading soil treading sediment bottoms
of ponds and streams hidden
in cedar swamplands
sharp quick nerve for our prey
elusive grey pelt
rudimentary eye
seeing is no conjurer’s game
our father’s months of paranoia
a “sunstroke”
death fingering him daily
full chorus singing non-stop insults in all keys
heart doing double time
hands idle
burrowing
into borrowed
sensation
we tunnel around each other
Three Old Frisian Sisters
In healjier is net oan de stôk bûn.
i. Siem
Wheeled into the garden, her dementia cuts corners.
“I am that ruined house.”
Roll up the table carpet.
Dense pile swallows dishes, ornaments.
Viscous red on brown, liquid column of white —
we’re stranded here — wedged into a mutely staring supper.
Coffee grinders hole-punch a patina sky.
Just try tying a year to a stake.
Llamas and goats graze a circumference.
Strolling shrubs, roosters and hens.
Hedges list toward sea-battened windows.
Turn down turn down the volume on the ocean floor.
ii. Tjits
Time, you old shuffler, where’s the ambler gone?
The body’s casualties pile up.
TV anchors converse in the living room.
Evening strollers wander through the hall.
Tick-burr heart and sugar-steeped blood
too much psychic traffic on twisted feet.
Children, come to her lonely supper.
Red plastic chairs, beaming metal legs await.
Her muffin orphaned between ordering and arrival.
A year cannot be bound to a stake.
Feet distress the stairs.
These young strangers — why are they here?
iii. Jacoba
Rain slicks the hair when she lives in a downpour.
War in the windows again.
Torso juts out of the wood fire.
A tarp once covered legs imperfectly, nothing to hide.
Day leapfrogs night, gnaws on sleepfolds.
Orange ghosts rib the cactus plant.
Knots will slip from a year tied to a stake.
An anxious button nictitates.
Orotund voices scatter words off a shelf.
Memory pills ransack flesh —
nausea, crimping muscle, fatigue, oh anorexia.
Wind carts her hydrangea hair into strangers’ gardens.
What is the sky thinking?
The snapper swan commingles with Leda again.
What are we humans doing below?
The Ones You Believe
Alle geasten moat men net leauwe.
don’t believe all spirits
just the ones
whose white hot teeth
afflict your spine
so you cannot
sit stand run
you burn cold
trying to find
love’s temperature
The Visit
Kom ik by dy, ús Heare God sil net by dy komme.
The crow flies
at the passenger side
of the car, braking
tail and accelerating wings.
Other crows carve rough
openings in a sky turned
on the horizon
like a screw-top lid.
My bestemming, my father.
Bestemmen, to intend.
My will says no my flesh says yes.
*
Family voices begin to ride
my roller-coaster spine
through one- and two-stoplight towns.
Internally exposed to the elements —
his house —
my liver revolts.
I may visit you, but I’m not God.
*
We drive further north
to the Mennonite for eggs, and after
visit my old catechism teacher. Chess pieces
at the table, we hear his story
of depression and its shame dogs.
My father shrunk
in a chair looks at fly specks
on the window.
Almost inaudible —
the soul’s creaking.
*
The prophet tells King David,
lately returned from Bathsheba mourning
her husband just killed on front lines:
A rich man, his backyard filled with sheep,
takes a poor man’s only lamb.
Like a daughter, it used to lie in his bosom,
drink from his cup. Faced with David’s rage,
the prophet says,
You are the man.
*
What insular theft
turned my father thief?
Who taught him to see life
as a God-slot where sin
must be paid and paid?
*
Bending
to my side of the car, one last lesson —
you’ve got to forgive — did my catechism
teacher say this?
*
The beeping fire alarm doesn’t need batteries.
Light a match under —
it shrieks.
Looks
Sy sjocht as in brette ûle yn de tange.
Those looks that can’t be classified.
No typology, no phases of the moon
can explain them.
A look that travels through the circus rings
of scalp and shoulders and triangle
of trapezius, that crinks the bowel,
that has the rider adrenal
gland kicking the kidney.
The look of an owl
roasting in the tongs.
A look Rembrandt in the Frick flings you,
self-portraiture a criss-cross of straining lines
in beefeater and fur and red sash and ochre,
face framing the livid cave of his eyes.
On Not Dying
In minske kin de waarme siel net behâlde.
There is no such thing as dying
Augustine says in City of God
puzzling where living becomes dying.
When you are still living you are not
dying but living until the moment
you are dead
and then you are not dying either
but dead.
He wondered too about the sundering
of body and soul formed in such intimacy
that the two are pulled apart
anguish grating
violin strings of the flesh
every bit of light and slices of dark.
The impossibility
of holding onto the warm soul.
Eulogy
Lit de dief eat oer, de brân lit neat oer.
I often felt
turpentine hatred
cut with liquid horror.
A hidden love distilled.
I often wished
he lay dead before me
and now
antiseptically he does.
I rehearse
a eulogy
for a theft and a fire.
The thief leaves something
but the fire leaves nothing.
Leeuwarden Train Station
Leeuwarden Train Station
Six years after my mother’s death, I ask my father about their first meeting.
Treeless gaunt, pleated into dirt-filled crevices, in one part of the story his eyes and voice sent a flare across the table: she caught me, she grabbed hold of me — words the word “hug” cannot translate.
She answered his ad in the newspaper: correspondent wanted by soldier, homesick, military service in Indonesia.
They met at the train station because she couldn’t bring anyone to the house. Her twenty-three-year-old sister had just died.
How her parents trusted him to take her to Canada.
She grabbed hold of him, and he would never let her go.
When we were very small, he would carry us under his arms like canvas rolls to the front stoop, along planks lined up over a muddy yard. For many more years, he would grab hold of us when the devil had a pitchfork up his ass.
When I visit him, his greetings are concise: oh, it’s you.
In more expansive moods, his greetings touch upon clothes: he recalled that his mother always referred to people wearing shorts as white sticks; he asked, do you know what a man said to a soldier? You can fill your boots with poop.
His hammer, his children the nails.
My father walks with two canes, head down, grimy yellow cap a hungry beak pecking at the sidewalk. I open the car door, will close it when he is inside, will drive him anywhere he wants to go, will sit for hours in his kitchen until the light falls gray, but I do not touch him.
His helplessness attracted your mother. She was a martyr, my aunt said.
In my mother’s grief fog, was the stranger she held on a terminating or a through platform?
If I can believe a star chart made by a Vietnamese Buddhist I met at a gym (he was accurate on other points) then one of my parents was sex-obsessed.
If my brother remembers this accurately, he found a flat package under the mat in the car while waiting for our father in the laundromat. It was quickly snatched from his hand when he waved the shiny square in the sun falling on the churning machines.
Was it delectable, the child’s bum he spanked red? A show, his gestures clown large, folderol laughter, I was the audience or in the ring, pants and underpants pulled down, teeter tottering across his lap. A circus for the very young.
How edible, children at any age. Still the child at any age.
The marriage pledge held my mother.
My father made solitary day trips to farmers’ trade shows, returning late at night.
She grabbed hold of him, skirted by love she didn’t feel for other suitors.
Only death did part them.
He bought three plots in the cemetery because he didn’t want anyone near her.
When I was twenty-two, my uncle drove me to Amsterdam and said goodbye outside the train station. His hands cupped my face; he looked intently at me — the gesture seemed important so I remembered it, but I felt outside its meaning.
My uncle’s only daughter, born three months and ten days after me, lived five years and 271 days.
My cousin sometimes fell down in the hall just after she got out of bed. And then the Hong Kong flu.
That same winter, a girl in my kindergarten class died. I saw the empty box where her things used to be stored. My mother saw me as the next fish to be caught on the fishing line, and ever after I ate with her sharpened knife and fork.
Living with those two ageless five-year-olds fills my tracks in snow.
For years, I feared that reaching look of my aunt and uncle.
In the hall of my apartment, my uncle reached out and kissed me on the lips, my body folding in awkward angles away from him. My aunt cut in sharply, Zij kan daar niet tegen — you’re upsetting her.
Waiting on the station platform, the proximity of wheeling life and the still life.
Not the life my mother wanted, but she had days of the sun falling on her just so.
Not the father I wanted, but the one my mother greeted at the station and followed to Canada.
Just once I visited my cousin’s grave, my uncle silent, walking ahead of us, my aunt talking — the many children who died that week, the doctor who said he would quit if one more child died — my uncle walking ahead in silence.
I could not venture any children into the world.
After a week away, in the hall with a suitcase, my cat greets me with a trill; I hold her close and kiss her. I do not do this instinctively with family.
My mother greeted him, and clasped him tight, the moment that decided him.
I find my father, in a red-checkered jacket and baseball cap, seated alone, in the back pew at the wedding. To my question, do you want to move closer to the front? he replies, are you ashamed to sit with me?
Is there any appetite so green as a child for a parent and so furious when the eyes of the room stare back empty?
There are so many moments before and after any photographic record when something in the flesh clicks open an aperture. My uncle and I sit on the black leather sofa looking at photos, a final act before the train station. When I close the small album, he turns to me and touches my face as if he could trace the ravenous child in the grown woman. As if the serviceable wings of a bee became a blur.
When my father thinks my visit is coming to an end, he turns to the pine trees bordering the lane and thanks me.
When my visit has really come to an end, he sits slumped in a chair by the wood stove. I walk across the gravelled vacant lot of my father. With store and gas pumps gone, no one plans to build.
My uncle cannot leave my aunt for very long — she may wander out into the street. From the train station, in too little time, the Atlantic between us again.
Only forest, fields, highways, lakes, towns and cities separate me and my father.
My father cannot let my mother go around the corner into her death.
About to drive into the glacial valley locals call the Hell Hills, my father asks — did Mama and I take good care of all of you? — a pause and then I say — yes?
Mid-afternoon traffic, sun glancing indifferently off metal and glass, my uncle tells me that they’ve had a Beetle and a Soviet car called the Ugly Duckling, small talk of departure right up to the automatic doors of the station.
As light fell in pearls, my mother held him, a stranger.
After my uncle’s farewell, I watch from inside the station doors. I realize he’s been sitting in his car a long time when he finally backs up and turns into the empty amphitheatre of the afternoon.
The train will leave on time.
I might walk through that meeting place, on my way to the train, where my mother held a stranger.
Still Life, Animal
Still Life: Reprise
Reclining on plush drapery
the house a virgin, white trim
languorous green grapes
on a blue habit. Rarely seen
blinking pomegranate winter seeds
in public now, almost a visitation.
Lightly furred kiwi, arcing cherry stems.
Down the dark hall of the window
dazzling on a royal apple, a fly,
pleated light on a wall. Unseen
irreligious wings. A decanter,
table holds a clear eddy,
eyeless eyes burst open manifold
and, above, revolving red wheels
lintels in the splinter of the moment.
Bloom.
Berlinale Erotik
Berlin Film Festival
i.
How did you find that film?
My body liked it.
ii.
Day into night and night into day
revolutions repeated too quickly
for the eyes and the ankles,
theatre to theatre, fi
lm to film.
The dark outside
spinning spits of illumination,
a fast city on its way.
Airy golden mistletoe
orbiting street lights —
only the constellations along the aisles
not turning.
iii.
A Lego giraffe, two stories
of yellow and brown blocks
on the sidewalk near
curved walls of blue glass.
Its neck the length of an escalator.
iv.
Neon bracelets mark the Canadians
at the Canadian Embassy party.
We seem to be designated the ambassador’s
friends — no one knows him in his own embassy
he says and tells us stories about George W. Bush.
In the small talk next to my friend’s silvery brightness,
I emit a few sombre pulses. The ambassador
holds her hand a long while when saying goodbye.
v.
Meryl Streep receives an honorary Golden Bear,
thanking all the husbands and boyfriends
who accompanied their partners
to her films. She’s not wearing stilettos;
her tall heels could walk across a lawn
without flinging her backwards.
She makes casual adjustments to her bust
as her Mrs. Thatcher does in The Iron Lady
and acknowledges that she gets all the glory
instead of directors and makeup artists.
The downside — in art galleries
people stare at her and ignore the paintings.
vi.
At the Gemäldegalerie I study Cranach’s
Last Judgment triptych with another
anonymous patron. We find devils
horseshoeing people,
note the frequent body piercing
(a stake through the chest, a spear
through the back), a stove combusting
sinners, spiky creatures
in cartwheeling hells, green
the colour of monstrosity.
The scene that began it all, the left panel,
a high-altitude battle of insects,
black and white angels,
and down below, in a tree,
a mermaid serpent with breast implants
gives an apple to a feckless girl and boy.
vii.
Berlin’s Erstes Erotik Labyrinth,
a darkened storefront