It's been a long time and I hope everyone is well. I've enjoyed the bits of news I hear every so often and would love to hear from everyone. I emailed Alyson in May about an ACA workshop in 2016 and she said she's working on March, but that it might be a long weekend format. I'd love to go to Carolyn's Santa Fe workshop, but I can't afford it because I'm planning to empty my pockets for a trip to Quebec City in September. One of my brothers is meeting me there, so I'll have company. Speaking of Quebec, I think I have the title both for my new book (the ancestry book, although a boatload of other people have gotten into it somehow) and for the first poem in the collection. I stole it from these lines in Emily Dickinson's The Lonely House: "The moon slides down the stair/
To see who's there." I'd love to have your thoughts. This is a long one for me and my first ABC poem.
To See Who’s
There
Able these days to search through centuries, I click,
scribble, cut and paste, skim, reject, record, resurrect
a wet stone wall, the smell of burning peat.
Bob’s your uncle, Peggy’s your aunt.
Name your family, child. My brother said hello
to Aunt Greg and Uncle Shirley. I was more careful.
Census takers listed the immigrants
once they had addresses, once they had standing.
Where were you born? Where was your father born?
Your mother? What can you do? What will you do?
If a Catholic infant died unbaptized they went to Limbo
until Judgment Day.
My Scots switched sides, switched back. Lost their land,
kept their heads.
Dad stopped going to Mass and so would go to hell.
I believed in this monstrous possibility once.
Emily Brontë’s moors rolled from the window seat in my
upstairs room
in Ramsey, New Jersey. I knew the wet air, the low purples,
greens, browns; the heavy skirts; his shadow in the doorway. I curled in nooks,
inglenooks.
Eulalie Routhier, baptized at Saint-Eustache,
Deux-montagnes, Quebec, in 1847.
My fruitless ovaries have shriveled to nothing—
my habit of naming children lives on. “Eulalie”
Four years of high school French, three of Spanish,
so when I went to Spoleto the summer I turned twenty-one
I swirled languages into a frothy entertainment for the
Italians.
I danced in operas, unwound with Chianti.
Grandfathers swallow the surnames of Catherines and
Elizabeths.
My compulsive clicking tracks them down. Blaison de Paris,
led me to Spanish sonneteers, humanists, and conquistadores.
Hell-bent on survival, my Irish joined the million who left.
Another million stayed to die, having no luck at all.
Ìñigo Lopez de Mendoza retired to his castle
in Guadalajara, La Mancha, Castile, when Catalina died in
1455.
She was twelve, he fourteen, when they married in 1410.
I’m certain of their devotion.
Jeremiah, Johan, Jakob, Johnny,
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George
Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only
three.
My mother’s mother, my Nonnie,
sang A.A. Milne to me. Her lovely voice.
Knisel, Kneissl, Kneisel, Kneissel, Kin eye zul.
Great-grandfather Adolph Gustav came to America, married Johanna Otillie, (everyone
called her “Tillie”)
who bore Charles Adolph, who fathered Robert Arnold
who married Doris Joan, who bore my three brothers and me.
Lovers, kiss on the immigrant ship.
Live through
the nights of roiling dark.
Let’s say I’ve made her up.
Let’s say I’ve written about him with authority.
Let’s say this is all fiction, all fact.
My mother never spoke of her childhood, even to me.
Her mind fastened on quotidian worries,
loosened from them only at the end,
when, losing pounds willy-nilly,
she ate chocolates and cheesecake, quietly.
Ottilie Augustine left Trieste
before James Joyce got there.
Anyway, he had his Nora.
Poisoned in Dieppe,
beheaded in Winchester,
killed in the Battle of Flodden Field,
but not before they sired children. What luck!
Quarantine: A
state, period, or place of isolation in which people or
animals
that have arrived
from elsewhere or been exposed to
infectious or
contagious disease
are placed:
“many animals
die in quarantine”
A pest house, pesthouse or fever
shed was a type of building used for persons afflicted with communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox or typhus. Often used for forcible quarantine, many towns and cities had one or more pesthouses
accompanied by a cemetery or a waste pond nearby for disposal of the dead.
Ragoût, der Eintopf, el estofado, stobhach,
stirabout, stew.
Settle on the banks of the Liffey, Loire, Neckar, Henares,
Loch Doon, on the Île
d’Orléans in the St. Lawrence.
Converge in the
city on Hudson Bay, make families, make me.
Typesetter, cooper, mill worker, farmer, beggar, sculptor,
soldier, abbot, king,
at home looking after the children, knight, saint, maid,
countess, poet, cook,
milliner, opera singer, piano teacher, carpenter,
politician, dancer, lumberjack.
Under quilts, canopies, the stars, in
privileged privacy,
with your children sleeping on pallets nearby,
with passionate hands
pulling him in, in, with crying out, whispered
caress, with fear.
Vainglorious Gilbert.
Waltheof’s children
watched when
they chopped
off his head
in Winchester.
X is the mark you make on the line the priest
points to. He writes
Catherine McCarthy and you admire the curves,
loops, ups and downs.
You might be my cousin. When you smile, your eyes might crinkle
so much they nearly disappear like Aunt Elsie’s, like mine.
You might have tiny arteries, a yen to sing opera,
a tendency to be gullible, the gene for alcoholism.
Zealous, desperate, the orphan boy Claude Robillard
is thirteen when he boards the Ste. André in 1663,
nineteen when he claims his own land in New France,
chops down a tree, another, another dans la sombre forêt.
