POEMS WRITTEN FOR AND ABOUT FAMILY MEMBERS

by Richard Smyth

Not bones broken by falls off of porches
or down stairs or drunken stumbling
or even by dogs chasing balls
but those broken by human hands
as when a woman has her lung removed
and the ribs must be snapped back
to expose the jelly flesh,
an intimacy of viscera.
Imagine them sawing through the sternum,
that thick stump of bone,
imagine the tool used to do it,
the rubber gloved hands, the spattering.
This is modern medicine, they do it all the time,
it’s miraculous and mundane and it’s your mother
under that sharp knife. She’s been there before,
too many times, for 12 years now
discovering again and again
that the body is made of tubes and fluid
and bound by the laws of physics.
There is no particular need to remember this moment—
it’s only one more chapter in one more life
as lived by millions—but there is a need
to recognize the significance of resilience,
the need we have to know
that one can go through darkness
and come out again into life,
that one can struggle even when struggling
seems impossible, that sometimes being human
is being super–human, beyond human—
the way life is larger than the forces that define it,
the way your living, your wanting to live,
helps me to live as well.

That’s why this poem is important:
it’s the story of single–celled creatures,
symbiogenesis, cellular sex and respiration:
the whole four billion year old story of life
in this universe, the miracle magic of it,
the perfect anthropic unfolding
of quantum possibilities.

To put it simply,
devoid of philosophical bullshit
(for that is how you’d want it),
it’s the story of life itself,
of how we live together,
of how we keep each other going
for as long as physically possible.

THE GENERATIONS

for Nana and Papa

"Her birthday is your birthday."

--Richard Brobst

See the generations
see how they gather about you
rains returning to the cloud
circles turning and returning.

See the great poem you have written
in your blood.

See how each is a word
spoken from your loins
to the future
in the language of hope.

Hear the song we all sing together
hear your song of chemistry and decades
think of how it is heard.

Know that you will always be alive in this.

FOREVER

for Abbe

As in the daily news now
delivered at our door

Or if not delivered then made:
the current event the miracles

And signs of God. As in
dirty dishes dirty clothes

Washed and cleaned washed
and cleaned and the dust!

And the dog hair to be swept
and vacuumed and the plastic

Bags for the poop and the shopping
always the shopping for food and

The body taking the food and
turning it into sunlight into

Fire into electric motion and
brainstorms. As in the scared

Seed ready to settle in your sacred
soil and the dirty diapers to follow

And the first smile and the first
words and the whole opening

Book of our lives the story
we are writing right now.

POEMS NOT WRITTEN FOR MY SONS

for Brendan, Jeremy, Connor, and Aidan

This is the poem of how life
unfolds in fat thighs, first words,
fingers in the frosting and falling
down, tying shoes and riding bikes.
The first steps you take are always away
and then you come back with lizards,
painted pictures, the bright bubble seed, ice
the size of broken glass and just as fragile
and say to me
look at what you have given
but I am too busy with lectures,
essays, the many many books
but you are happy because I am there
and I am not because I am gone
forgetting to remember that you are poems,
everything you do is a poem
waiting to be spoken
and by the time I remember
your hands are almost as big as mine
and I am lost in time
like seeds that fall far from the tree
and never take root in hard December soil.

MOTHER OF THE BIG STONE

This is the time when she
saw me beneath the bully,
her son, her fleshy blood
under attack. I watched her
approach slowly, deliberately,
she was coming to avenge me,
the violence of fear that I endured
all school year long, she carried
the strength of motherhood
down through time to that
moment, every angry animal
was within her, every wild blood-
filled heart of the mother defending
her young, claws bared, fangs, hairs
bristling.

He didn't see that. He saw a woman
and he learned from his father
that women get hit, children get hit,
he learned how hurting people provides
the illusion of control, so he played
at hurting me, at being the abusive
father he'd become, and didn't see
any of that gathered in my mother's
long slow walk toward us.

Then her hand flew out of her robe
pocket, carrying the big stone, and her
legs kicked out, and she became the
fang and the claw all at once, and he
began to run but she threw the stone
and it hung in the air like smoke, like a
firework, and he ran right under it,
and it hit his back, and he knew then
the powerful forces that he was playing with.

FATHER OF THE BIG HANDS

I am remembering my father
of the big hands,
the ones that held me back
from disaster
that time
I stepped off the curb
into a New York City street.
I was going to cross
when his hand held me
from the rushing car, it was so big
it covered my whole chest, the chicken
ribs of my chest, from neck to belly,
from side to side, it held me the way
basketball players palm the ball, I was
completely in his grip
as he held me back from death,
from certain, stupid death.

That was his left hand. With
his right hand he held me pinned
to the seat of his VW bug, one
of the many he wrecked, in the
days before seatbelts, when he had
to slam on the brakes, his hand, his big
big hand, that spanned my whole body,
he held back the forces of inertia, he
defied science and all its laws of motion,
his strength was the strength of fatherhood,
strength forgotten in his slow
booze suicide suddenly risen once again.
I still feel his hand there, the way the forces of
nature conspired against me, the way he
and his big hand defied that universe
to keep me whole.

These were the same hands that held beer cans,
the hands that held cigarettes,
the lost and broken hands that could not
create. Even in death
his hands were big, as though
to carry oneself into the grave one must have
hands
as big as his, as strong and wide,
hands that remembered their ancestry
in broken bones, flint chisels, knives
the size of whole bodies.

FATHER OF THE BOWLING BALL

I remember finding father's
big black bowling ball.
The three holes were like
some wondrous face,
it looked the way he looked
through his whole broken life:
dumbfounded, stunned,
wondering what life was
and how he was to live it.
The holes were too deep for me
to reach, the rims wide and sharp,
and their span stretched farther
than my hand would ever grow to
in adulthood. Its bag had
plastic handles, the zipper
brittle like a broken serpent
and one white rag to wipe it
smooth. And the ball,
the ball was big and black,
he banged it down the alleys
and it carried every scar
the way he carried scars,
right there on the surface,
right where you can see them,
if you look up close: a whole
geography of pain, a whole
world of slamming into
pins, knocking them down and
down and down again.

I watched him bowl as a boy,
I saw the way he balanced the ball
on his thick fingers, I saw him stare
at the pins in concentration, and
the slow shuffle forward, how
his hand came back and his back bent
down, his arm raised high, big hand
gripping hard, then it snapped
forward like a spring, his leg kicked
out and he reached toward the pins,
a god sending energy into the air and
waiting, waiting, watching
for what happens.