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The Unknowing

My grandfather was born after the earthquake and

fire, began work at four, buried his mother at six.

Summers he picked prunes in the valley,

sun-seared spots on his narrow shoulders.

He lost an eye. Blew out his left eardrum

in a packing-plant accident.

He didn’t make friends, a luxury

time could not afford, smoked

through college while doubling

as an accountant, dedicating nights to numbers,

pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known.

A gift, my father was born at the end of the

Great Depression to my grandfather’s German wife — unaware of

the rubble from which he emerged.

A child among the fragrant groves

of Sacramento imported to give a desert

town some shade. Given a ’57 Chevy

at sixteen, my father rolled it twice

driving home from football games,

license never suspended, too easy

to make such things go away. His father,

midclimb into the airless summit of his

unexpected career, did not attend his games.

The sting of failure learned unobserved.

Davis, then Berkeley, then seminary,

where, among closeted homosexuals

and anguished penitents, my father felt in God

a familiar sense of bruised neglect.

He dropped out, worked as a prison

guard with teenagers put away for

knife fights and petty thievery,

one year, peripheral vision and dropstep

adjusted, never softened.

I was born in Cleveland, where he moved

for more school yet sensed the developing sinkhole.

My mother, cute as a young nurse,

from an Ohio land-grant family who paid her

credit-card bills. They lived near Woodland,

he wore zipper boots, drove a dropped ’69 Mustang.

It took years to conceive. Their gratitude for children

was immense.

A brick thrown at his head from a passing bus

reminded him that though he felt an outsider,

the color of his skin appeared white.

Nights in Long Island and then

Pennsylvania, his lips on our heads,

so kind as to be unnoticed. We slept unbroken.

I don’t remember once having dinner after six.

Our biggest complaint, the wait before we could

race out into the humid falling dark to hear

the pop of the ball against our mitts.

Thirty years after he left Sacramento, we returned,

his mother long since dead. The sun poured

down on our backs at the swim club, sunspots scorched

onto our broad shoulders. Waking to mists, to tinny clock-radio top-

forty hits, we sleepwalked to the garage

in the gloaming, where at five he stood

counting newspapers sprung from their plastic

wrappers, my brothers and I pedaling into the fog to

the squeal and crank of our bicycles.

Halfway through the route, we’d come upon his car,

rear gate agape, Bach aerating the silence,

a lightship docked among the palm fronds

of an indifferent neighborhood mapped by

a developer who had long since died. He tosses

us another forty papers, packed roughly

and quickly so that we never finished later

than six.