Dunedin Causeway, 2002
We drove out to Dunedin Causeway,
you, strapped into your car seat
in the pickup you later told me I couldn’t sell.
We walked the rocky shoreline
and the whole Gulf of Mexico reached
right up to your sparkling shoes.
In this photograph, you launch
a stone the size of your head
towards the horizon.
Your open hand points
and your whole body stretches into the arc
you have created in lofting
something into the wider world.
You did not see me take this picture.
I let you range when you were little—
ride ahead of me on your bicycle,
explore the nuts and bolts in the hardware store,
and, here, out in your own wilderness
I watched, as always, when you weren’t looking.
Today, you live a thousand miles away,
launch phrases and cadenzas into a note-starved world,
your bow arm at right angles to your body,
your left hand pressing the fingerboard into sound.
On any particular day, I won’t call, I won’t text
as you find sacred places on your own.
But I am watching, child, I am watching—
and I think you’ve always known.
White Rose
Sophie Scholl, a university student and member of the White Rose resistance movement in Germany during World War II, was arrested in February 1943 while distributing the movement’s sixth leaflet at the University of Munich. Her executioners have remarked on the courage with which she met her death.
Sophie placed the sheets of paper
gently by each closed door
like flowers, something to give life
when visited by bees, white birds,
the hands that knelt to pick them up.
She had walked through Munich’s darkened
streets for sun-starved months,
her copy of Faust under one arm,
the flyers against brownshirts and hatred
tucked between pages on Mephistopheles.
This day the sun had broken
the early morning clouds,
pushed into the quieted classroom
at the university. She paused
as she placed the papers on each chair.
Dust motes rose in the warmth
of the bright beams that stretched into the room
and the papers with drawings of roses
and neat German script shone white.
For that moment, she saw herself
as Germania, the huge statue on the Rhine,
with words for her sword, pages as a shield.
She would no longer live at night
and so opened a window. The sun
warmed her face, bird sounds
like blessings to her. Sunlight
like a warm hand, graced her shoulder.
Released from her hands, the flyers
floated like pollen into those walking
to class, those walking to days
that pretended to be days.
At home, she made coffee,
put on a Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,
her best white dress.
Sophie Scholl opened the last pages of Faust
and waited.
Hurakan Spell
My father leaned over my bassinette
and put a charm in my blood from Hurakan,
Taino god of the storm, so weather would follow me
and rage around me, so I would rest in the eye
and be unharmed.
In September, 1965
I was only five months old. Someone held me.
The air inside felt still and moist,
The light through edge of the boarded window
soaked with a dim pall. Rained hummed heavy
with wind. Mortal beings inside were silent prayer.
My father says I cannot remember this, but I do—
images in my head, heaviness of the storm,
the quiet of adults holding their breaths
all of it in a wordless memory.
On my father’s 23rd birthday,
we hunkered in a concrete building
in Key Largo while Hurricane Betsy howled.
That ancient god visits me in thunderstorms.
He gave me stern warning when I took a twenty-foot sloop
when a tropical storm was off the Yucatan and put her on the rocks.
My daughter and I dodged storms in the fishing boat
one afternoon, until we had to put her bow
into the wind as a gale came through.
She heard the voice of Hurakan as we waited out the wind
and her eyes spoke fear and respect.
The cancer was a storm I weathered while it swirled inside
the cyclone of my body and I came out like a battered ship
that I fitted better when the skies had cleared.
My father’s death is a storm I weather still,
his old blessing in my blood. I keep a weather eye
and know the shape of clouds over sea or land,
this life swirling in grey bands.
