Dad

some say to remember
you changed for the better
ten years since you died
yet you still come between your offspring
and i wonder how you can rest
after denying your eldest

so why do i still chase you

i take buses and trains
through your soul because
longing alone cannot tell
stories of ancestors

Across these years
across our distance,
as your children grow,
I hold the image of
your eldest dancing to drums,
rhythmic toddler in ecstasy.

But my eyes never kissed your youngest
when I declined to attend
the dancer's birthday party,
unwilling to let angry confusion
between us
taint his celebration of life.

I see you and me as
bones broken by adults
who split our spirits with lies
and tried to set us in their own image.

My heart aches for you,
Sister, born 2,000 miles from
where my mother bore me.
You, Island Sister, raised by the ocean,
tasting flavors foreign to my childhood.

Under my skin, I wear a necklace
strung from sacred moments,
those brief openings of soul,
when you shared secrets that
still burn my heart.

We may stand apart, but your beauty calls to me.
One day I hope to hold your chest against mine,
inhale the fragrance of your hair,
study your face etched by love and pain, loss and gain.
One day I hope we make peace.

circles spiral
    dizzy dizzy down
around our lives
invisibly overlapped to
    repeat repeat stories

when will we see
the spun presence
encompassing ancestors
stones on the land and
stumps around us

stolen
    boulder by boulder
and a loop noosed
to slice memory
away from flesh

when we remember
our pockets lined by
a knife shaped by a blacksmith
and a stone
    rubbed rubbed to point

when we remember
each one's use
to cut binds
around minds that
    deny deny circles

shaping us and them
    tight tight into clay
round and fire-hardened
sure to fragment
with force

      " What you hear here,
        What you see here,
        When you leave here,
        Stays here. "
          – on the gate at Wendover Air Force base,
             where the dropping of the atomic bomb
             secretly was practiced during World War II

our mothers birthed us
across all seasons
and he knew not
how to rear his blood

he torn by war from
his old man's bruising weight
and dog-tagged bodies in black bags

silence became
the shroud wrapped around
his mouth

secrecy became
the void between
his cut cords

and his evasion begot
abandonment
and isolation

yet we are linked
by the seed
planted in our mothers' wombs

we grow strong
our roots grow long
healing from storms and droughts

we are linked
in persistence
by rings of life

a ring of life
for every year
our trunks widen

we are trees
who sing away
his silence

The bell-curve shape misleads because the clock is not average, nor was her life, her roots Appalachian, a Tennessee tomboy, middle child of seven. Her father moved the family to Oregon, and her mother never saw her people again.

The clock's stamp reads 'made in West Germany', reminding how walls split mother tongues. She met him while working the Portland shipyards, while engaged to a soldier at war, and she struck one fiancé for another.

The tailfin key winds three gears, and every hour the clock strikes the same number of times. She followed her husband with their children eastward to Michigan, and winter became the longest season of her life.

Golden hands declare the minute and hour as the clock crowns a cabinet. Although she had no mantle on which to sit this clock she held memories, and as a widow called her first fiancé, a married man.

The clock gains time, an asymmetric pull like her life in tow of men, nevertheless hers to own. And when the hour unevenly strikes, as if some sound slips yet insists to be distinguished, it is her story I hear.