Mennonites

Grandmother, Edna Benner Styer, died yesterday, April 15, 2009, at 5:15PM.

I do not know what this means yet. I have many memories of holidays at my grandparents' house on Cowpath Road, Hatfield, PA. I noticed recently that I inherited her cowlick at the front of her hairline, above her left eye. She gave my father the palest skin, and he, in turn, gave it to me. I have been disconnected from her for most of my life, as my parents moved to Indiana, then Massachusetts, from Pennsylvania, before I was born, and raised me and my brother there. She always sent birthday packages with chocolate covered pretzels and Landis treats, I did not send enough Thank You cards. I keep thinking that this is simply how life works, it ends. Hers did not end unexpectedly.

I do not know what this means yet.

Secret Life

I am incorrigibly nostalgic. The worst of it is that regardless of the finality of a relationship, or the time that passes between the end of it and the present, I always long to return to it, to have it again. I am nostalgic regardless of quality; no matter that during it I was miserable, constantly convinced of the wrongness between us. Those I want again were the most urgent, and also the most tenuous. The only way we knew to communicate properly was to stop using our voices and use our mouths and hands instead. And then of course, the things at which we were not good, understanding, agreeing, and laughing, were almost entirely forgotten.

Listen
by Charles Simic

Everything about you,
my life, is both
make-believe and real.
We are like a couple
working the night shift
in a bomb factory.

Come quietly, one says
to the other
as he takes her by the hand
and leads her
to the rooftop
overlooking the city.

At this hour, if one listens
long and hard,
one can hear a fire engine
in the distance,
but not the cries for help.

just the silence
growing deeper
at the sight of a small child
leaping out of a window
with its nightclothes on fire.