Holiday
The '57 Chevy, black and white
and anchored in the morning sun,
stands waiting in the driveway
of my imagination for the four
of us to climb into the caul
of its cockpit, father behind
the wheel's omega curve, mother
in the seat beside him fussing
with the beehive of her black hair
and telling us to roll the windows up,
don't sit too close to the door,
and keep our hands off the handles.
For this is how each trip began,
holiday, my mother called it,
a sea of mystery ahead of us,
two rowdy boys, like all
who never saw the end before
it came, invading the backseat,
shipping like Castor and Pollux
on a fleecy quest. Now I sit
like a child again, peering through
the mind's glass where the car
is pregnant with the four of us,
my father turning to back his way
down the drive and into the future,
as Paul set out to teach at Rome
in a ship named for the Gemini.
The car spins off in morning light.
The world is swaddled in its blue
like a bandage round my memory.
Coming Clean
Mother did the fishing. She
brought the gifts to us like pearls
to sort by size and clean. Father
began by getting newspaper
and spreading it on the workbench
in the dim corner of the garage,
a butcher knife, a sack in which
to spill the shining guts and me.
He cut the heads off first,
then turned the fish and held
it by the tail and ran the blade
along the belly.
He fingered out
the mess that made me choke
in silence, then handed off
the knife. I turned the fish again
and scraped the blade along
one empty side and then the other.
The pearly scales popped in the air
like sequins through the dirty light.
Black Diamond
When coal became a substitute for turf,
the name stuck like the coal itself,
Black Diamond: "And fine enough."
Descending the timbered shaft was
a journey past the present hardship
of bringing up the company's desire,
a trek into the lightless future, beyond
the bog-brown turf his father cut
to keep them warm, beyond the tongue
of hungry wind off the hungrier Atlantic.
When a black slab split away
from the timbered-propped roof
and broke his back, they laid him like
the coal, wagon-bedded in the coach
of death, and slapped the dumb horse,
his name pinned like a hallmark
to the pocket of his shirt. When he
survived some thought him blessed,
some cursed. His back forever bore
the coal's cruel petroglyph
like a record of a deal with death.