catherine

Because she was born in a shed, the one room house they showed us, years and years later, whitewashed, roofed in red tile, I imagine my grandmother's childhood in straw, the dry rustling, cold through the cracks, never enough salt to pinch between fingers. We find her brother living next door in the carpeted house, the only one left after the hulls swallowed them all, four girls. His hair is so thick and so white, like hot bleached stone, his face scrubbed red and his eyes delighted blue, but his wife is tiny, like a hobbled bird. She serves us watermelon rind in honey and bitter coffee. Her husband, my grandmother's brother, asks my mother, does she go to school? his neck jerking, and my mother says, yes. Tell her not to study too hard it will spoil her beauty, and I am making the table like a good subversive and my mother and I look at each other and smile as she translates. We know we are only visitors here; we have been given this at the price of someone else's life. In this photograph, I am wearing designer jeans and I am turning a lamb on a spit in the village.

Not meant for the plush upstairs but for the demands the earth makes of those who cling to its hide, a packed trunk of useless knowledge: how to read faces like weather, to wheedle necessity out of invaders, how to dab olive oil to extract the evil eye, how to cook whole lambs and dye eggs blood-red, how to always be careful, all this lodged in the brick of her genes along with the new world's longing - cigarettes and lipstick, democracy and cabs, movies and window curtains. So it is no wonder that she created epic struggles out of air, why when the three of us born with nutrient-rich good teeth huddled in the back of the station wagon somewhere on the I-80 in Wyoming, driving from coast to coast, the high orange flash of a storm on a darkening horizon, she never filled the tank at the last gas sign, but waited, until halted on the off-ramp with the radio sputtering tornado warnings, we were awed that there in the desolate wilderness waited a motel and salvation. In this photograph we are all three standing against a fence next to a cornfield in Nebraska, our faces showing what we learned: to keep our eyes on her always.

A trip to Greece, the summer I turned sixteen, anger lifted from the hot ground between us with the force of thunder, flashes all the way up from Pelion to Delphi and back to Athens, the rest of the family helpless passengers. We have been fighting for years, ever since the small worm of my body began to squirm, wriggling out of her grasp, the weight of her large arms marking every path in front of me. She is facing the camera charging, and I am holding my ground. Amazingly, I am wearing transparent cotton pants, the line of my underwear clearly visible, my hand on my hip, my face turned away in what is probably a pout: I think I am fashionable. Columns, standing and fallen, marble bright, surround her as she strides, black smock covering her size. This photograph also reveals not enemies standing there but allies, her body's layers of protection no less injured than mine, my body - surprisingly beautiful but so despised, thrown to the lions as often as possible. Her anger a warning.

In this photograph, we are on the beach in Provincetown in a cluster of women. Somehow she has gotten us here, discovered this refuge far from the yacht club linens of my father's cousins down Cape; for twelve summers running the tourist trade in a store where I scrubbed my first toilet proudly, showing the clean porcelain to Jude, who snorted, Jude, who with her great mane would roll up her white shirt, unbuttoned to show the day's reddish tan, Jude who never lacked women. Like Sandy, who came in one day like a stray soaked from the rain, years later she shooed boys off the porch for us, a dog running after ducks. On the west coast in winter, the mother friends, with large, contented breasts, ladling equal portions of calm and noise; on the east coast in the summer, the outcast women who adopted her as their own lost mother, and we were free to roam in and out between the town's legs. This is not a story but a journey, so this is a photograph to say we were given fear and bravery in equal portions, launched from a village into America still swimming.

What might be in her face holds up its hand
as if to show this palm holds no surprises, even
the skin has opened into wide plains and prairies.
Do you think your face could ever look like this at 70?
Fear for what your features might demand of you
in order to obtain that burnished rock under water
smooth finish, the unlocked doors of each expression,
the invitation to where nothing remains unexamined,
even the posture, a temporary upright rest for clothes,
even the clothes, flowing, expensive, from the far-off,
prevent you from making that choice, or so you think.
Because you are still too fond of the well-furnished,
feel annoyed when truth asks you to choose it, the cold
or the compromised indoors, you imagine you are safe.
Just remember when the makeup has begun to flake,
shoulders hunched, your spine shrinking, you
gave authority that much guile. They will not spare you,
your granddaughters, for mistaking solitude so much.
As you do not spare your grandmothers, hobbled or free.

Los Angeles reminds him of the Fitzi Continis
that movie about Italy in the 1930's, the family

in tennis whites who ignored the gathering storm.
He reports that Heidi Fleiss (that troublemaker

from the old Los Feliz neighborhood) is out on bail,
selling underwear to make a buck. Now she's notorious

he acts like she's a relative, outraged she got three years.
He writes about Murietta hot springs, faded near Temucula

the ugly malls abutting the old resort, how they will walk
or if it's too hot "hang out" - after thirty years in California,

his formal Baltimore training permits these quotation marks.
Dr. Rubens has arrived for a cancer weekend, the NHS

collapsing, even Guys under threat. American doctors
have had their golden years, he says he should be glad,

he thinks, that he is at the end of his career. In Washington,
he worries about the swing to the right, no good news there.

What really moves my father's letter? I search the spindly lines,
his medical scrawl, as if his hand endured some trauma once,

perhaps when his mother, child of the Lithuanian-Jewish baker
but with ambitions to be as well-buttoned and well-gloved

as the German tribe of Gertrude Stein, aristocratic immigrants,
forced him with a funnel to eat boiled new world greens,

giving him a permanent cramp, or the day the rabbi blamed
Americans for the Holocaust and my father renounced God,

or the fact that he was born on the shortest day of the year,
nine months after his sister, and was unwanted, every month.

Around the edges of each line, a foggy pessimism, soaked
into the letter, scanned again and again, as if to find a simile,

or metaphor to uncover the love rising out of inky clouds,
umbrellas of tenderness to buffer us from the coming dark

The one who lives in Jackson Mississippi
writes to the one who lives in London:
it is fall. Rosh Hashana has surprised us
with unfinished directions, not the usual clear wine
of resolution, ripe for winter's inward turning.
To console myself, I have gotten stoned
and walked in thin sunlight to the movies,
where in the shivering dark I hold my own hand.
On the screen, the beautiful Mexican daughters
of the patriarch, Anthony Quinn
who reminds me of your mother, actually,
with his Greek expansive gestures,
dance on the grapes with the slender limbs
of deer against an impossible amber Napa sky.
You who keep the tiny green bulb of my history
alive in your palm, thousands of miles away
remember how much I once loved women,
how I wrote to you from summers in Israel,
learning politics and sincerity in one language,
tramping miles of earnest dust? Closed roads,
these paths in my heart which snake and expire
unspoken here in Jackson, with my respectable,
bearded husband, my porched yellow house.
How did we end up in these unnecessary exiles?
Is it our blood, so used to gathering its belongings
against thugs or invaders to cross sudden water
that has impelled us to break peace with ourselves
when no war threatened? Write to me in the south
where I have landed, hungry for your thoughts.

The one who lives in San Francisco writes
to the one who lives in Jackson: fall has crept
into my bones, a kind of lethargy to go to ground.
Why at 28 have I chosen to become a doctor?
A midwife would have suited me much better
but I can not stand men in white bossing me around.
Lately, I swim in dreams of enormous earthquakes
breaking beyond the limits of the Richter scale,
a peristalsis of the earth strong enough
to uncouple the land from the continent,
buildings from their moorings, past from future.
When I step into a moment then at the settling,
like stepping into a skiff leaving the shore,
it is the time I lived on the beach in Baja, remember,
tutoring the untamed daughter of that couple from Bolinas.
Under my tent, I built an altar out of shells,
believed goddesses dwelled in dolphins and whales,
our familiars, who washed with us every morning,
rising up out of water to scrape barnacles off hides,
no more strange after a time, than the ocotillos,
the saguaros and the agaves dotting the desert
or the soft and windless floors of the arroyos
twisting back to the Sierra Madres. All that
became natural as planning visits by moon's time,
joy so easy that it seemed like sand's abundance.
Perhaps you can explain, next time you write,
how we let dreams go without a fight, diverted
into other channels? Yours, write soon, with love

The one who lives in London
writes to the one who lives in San Francisco:
if I could be anywhere right now it would be
in your kitchen preparing dinner, sitting
at the table under the sill lined with tomatoes,
smell of coffee and mexican chocolate,
home brewed beer, barrels of wine vinegar,
breaking off stems from a pot of runner beans,
potatoes steaming and you would be sweeping,
still in the sweat and green cap of a general
unglamoured before the evening.
I would be happy just to see the jars of cereal
crowding the shelves, stacks of old paper,
the orange cat, who whines like a child,
fat, hungry, too intelligent, the sunlight
pushing between the door and the floor boards
which are never clean of hair. Whatever
you were saying would not matter because
after centuries of clinging to earth to duck troubles,
we would have entered the free harbor of dailiness.
Instead, I write to you from a room blue as the sea
above slate roofs and windy streets where landlocked
seagulls circle above rain-washed dumps.
Not yet alighted anywhere so simple,
we are still here in our words, reaching
across vast inner continents to find each other.