Learning the In−Words
Lubec Channel, Maine
The summer my cousin became an angel
I gripped his coffin right-handed and carried
His body to where all six of us Fincke boys
Were turned into children again, directed
By a stranger"s hand to the leather couches
Of an enormous car. Inside the fingers
Of my right hand, a white groove darkened to red,
Then vanished, while silence shouldered among us
Until Keith, nobody"s brother, was absence.
The last time I"d seen Keith he"d looked as pale
As an angel. He"d held both his hands against
His head as if he was listening closely
For the shallow breath of God, but that morning,
Among my cousins in that car, I became
A boy who believed he was the only one
Eight years old who understood he was alone.
The suited driver watched us in the mirror.
I tried, each time his eyes flicked over and up,
To stare what I"d learned into his memory.
There was war with no winner in Korea,
Communists who whispered darkness while we slept.
No one talked about the inconceivable
While I"d been learning the in-words: incomplete,
Incurable, inconsolable, incensed.
As if I"d stolen them from my aunt"s black handbag,
I kept those words to myself, afraid to spend them.
The Casual Slurs
Early in an evening of remembering death,
I tell my friend that after the Kent State shooting,
After students like me went home and waited out
Our anger, the police came armed to Jackson State
Like a recreation of the Ohio Guard.
They herded those students, I tell him. They backed them
Against the front wall of a dorm and suffered stones
And bricks until they opened fire as if they"d loved
The headlines from the week before, emulating
The Midwest"s faux-army, sustaining their gunfire
Thirty seconds with an armory of weapons.
Almost five hundred times, I say, they hit that dorm.
Two dead, twelve wounded, all of them "nigger students"
According to the cop who called in the shooting.
That speaker"s nickname was "goon," something history
Can"t make up, his casual slurs, on tape, leaching
Into the voiceless future to poison language,
The violent separations that mark our speech
Though we"ve forgotten their indecipherable
Beginnings, ones like birth and the early years, what
We hear about from the mouths of those who love us,
Their stories working to share the unknowable.
