Free Association
When my father came home
from his father’s funeral,
he said we might be Russian,
Jewish even. He said other things,
like how his father looked
better than he had in fifteen years.
I still don’t know if that was humor
in the process of transmuting grief.
My mother didn’t want me
seeing death at that age.
I was eleven, old enough
to say goodbye, to wrestle
with the undefeated. What she was
thinking I can’t say, but even now
I rarely go to funerals. I’m smiling
now because I’m thinking, probably
because of what my father said
in line four, of the palest person
I have ever known. Michael Rosen,
known as Spider, shielded
by the highest-number sunscreen,
was the first to take a Playboy
from his father’s bureau
and reveal it to us in the daylight
with a play-by-play narration
of its glossy contents.
He and I were sitting at a table
in a tony place in Georgetown,
overlooking the Potomac River
on a June night in the Clinton years.
Spider was more confident
and buzzed than I had ever seen him,
and he leaned back in his chair
and said with borrowed smoothness,
“Hey, now,” each time someone lovely passed.
It is the world’s way sometimes
not to recognize an inborn gentleness
as the default. So I explained
that people didn’t know him
well enough to laugh. They didn’t know
the number sunscreen he depended on,
his inability to tie a tie.
I don’t remember when I saw him last,
but I remember in that era he was dating
someone domineering from Iran
and I was working for a man named Lovejoy,
caring for a pair of Shelties
named for isles in the Hebrides.
Strange
The other day I did a thing I’m certain
that my father never thought to do.
I spent a quarter of my paycheck
on an oil painting by a friend
I haven’t seen in more than twenty years.
It’s sixteen by twenty inches,
and I wonder where I got the gene
that has no problem with me staring
at the space I have allotted for the painting
on the wall between the living room and kitchen.
Like my father, I had not considered
how much time is necessary
for such art to fully dry.
So I’ll be driving to my friend’s house
near the Hudson River at the end
of May to claim the painting,
which is called Strange House,
and do a little hiking in the Catskills,
which I’m certain is another thing
my father never thought to do.
As you can probably tell, I’m trying,
since it’s been so long,
to hold more tightly to my father,
to remember similarities
and differences as clearly as I can.
When times were tight,
I went with my father to his night job
cleaning banks. We vacuumed,
dumped the trash cans, stood beside
each other polishing the vault door,
strangers somehow but beloved.
Idyll
In 1976, a sparkler flaring
in each hand in celebration
of the Fourth, I couldn’t have
imagined that Estonia
or any other country in the world
could be more free than what the song
has always said quite clearly
is the land, no irony,
no winking, of the free.
But there it is.
The Human Freedom Index doesn’t lie.
I’ve checked it fifty times, and each time
Latvia is still four places higher
than America, which I was taught
was basically a synonym
for freedom. We are tied
for seventeenth with Lithuania
and the United Kingdom. Countries
I had no idea were countries,
no offense to Cabo Verde,
are as close to us in terms of being
free as we are to New Zealand,
poised at number two, this close
to Switzerland, the leader
of the free world, which I can’t help
feeling should be our position, #1,
the perch and title we would have
to jump the likes of Luxembourg
and Denmark to reclaim.
If you had told me all this
on the Bicentennial, I would have twirled
my sparklers in your eyes
and found my father by the orb grill
or my grandpa who had ties to World War II
and asked if it could ever be true
that a country that has never been
the setting of a Western
or the home of Abner Doubleday
could ever be more free than we are.
We’d listen to the sizzle
of the flesh whose plight was not on us
and to the independent fireworks
on other blocks, in other yards,
to ice cubes and the opening
and closing of the Coleman,
to unbridled laughter and to talk
of mostly nothing, to mature
forsythia adjusting to the breeze,
and we’d know that no other country
in the world was waiting as we were
for nightfall and the big show to begin.