Thomas Cook

Origin Stories

I.

Tell me not what you know but what you remember. Tell me

I was born to write this poem just like you tell me we are

born to live and die. Tell me about Lynyrd Skynyrd, about

July 7, 1974. Tell me about sleeping in the locker room, and

Larry Junstrom, and keeping their cigarettes lit.

Before that, tell me about the desert. Tell me about the dates

that stuck to the back your teeth, about wandering the base

in diapers, about the rattlesnake in Jimmy’s crib. Tell me

dust-to-dust. Tell me you put your feet out the window and

steered the sedan the whole way home with a window

scraper on the gas. Tell me Mike fell in love, in San Diego,

and you had to tell him to get in the car or get married. Tell

me about Yucatan. Tell me about coming back on fumes,

about never seeing Twentynine Palms again, about driving

all the way to the Redwoods when there were still six of you.

What the light was like in a child’s eyes as it came through

the backseat window. How it felt on your bare skin.

Tell why I was born with this thirst. Tell me why I will lick

walls and banisters. Tell me why dyslexia, why I’m attracted

to letters when they are nothing but rows of symbols. Tell

me not to suck on the bookmark tassel. Not to dry it on my

nightlight while I sleep. The whole house could burn down. Tell

me the lake is deep. Tell me the mice come in through the

walls when it gets cold. Tell me we can hear the coyotes. Tell

me there’s dark water, and it’s deeper than I think.

II.

I’m walking along an outgrowth of the Connecticut,

an oxbow in Northampton, Massachusetts,

and the fall is orange and yellow.

Underneath the loose damp planks

that bicycles tires of couples batter,

the water breaks and foams against the rocks.

That morning, my father told me about the procedure,

which won’t keep him from hunting pheasants.

All I picture is an ailing man in Minnesota winter

fifteen feet in the air in a deer stand,

camouflage against the sheer white,

a bottle of blackberry brandy tucked in his boot.

What I want to ask him,

which I never do, which he won’t allow

for all his foreclosing of concern

is what it’s like to have a son and not know

one’s father.

III.

Home is a hungry backstroke

a radish sting

a thousand tongue pricks

more to know

To know the blood you drown in

is like water

fangs of the patron

a kind of love

Love goes on saying

what is and what is not

a strange bulb

or is final

or leaves me

___

Alone my mouth

is behind a curtain

thirstier than I can ever be

is a cell

for a father                             

___

Belief is the edge of analogy

we can be astonished standing near the shore

we can take in the blind tide

The tide

here and there

opens my mouth

___

Here

with a drop

Or there

without

Is nothing that I can bear

that I cannot

IV.

I visit the town where I grew up.

It isn’t easy getting back anymore.

Where I used to drive a gravel road,

a case of warm beer rattling on the floorboards,

I find condominiums, sandwich shops,

a juice bar. I have friends who left

and came back to raise families.

When I drop by, their boys ask to swing

from my arms, climb me like a tree.

On New Year’s Eve, my father and I argue.

It isn’t like it used to be. We’re older,

and, bent over, he tells me if I never want

to talk to him again, to never come back,

it’s my choice.

The next morning,

he’s vacuuming snowmelt from the garage floor.

We talk, later, about the bedroom closet

where my mother has kept everything:

birthday cards, school photos,

newspaper clippings and programs.

I’m sorting through it all,

remembering who I am. He’s there,

watching me, hoping I can toss it all out.

There is only so much, he says, that you can save.

V.

Is ours, father, a story of imitation,

a return like the waves

we turn west to watch break

on this last trip when you visit me here?

Is this a story of folly or belief

in the slivery content

of another person?

We do share the name,

and there is one reason

I know the smell of gunpowder.

Otherworldly orbits we experience now,

because they arrive here,

in the form of lengthening days

and your return to place of your birth.

They give us extra time

with the closest, most dying star

we now try to keep

off our foreheads

as we push up the coast.

We get lost in Santa Ynez,

in four million acres,

and when we get back into town,

over our second,

the names begin to spill out.

The names of cousins

like deserts on opposite continents,

our connections to this region

we only now explore.

It feels almost impossible

we’re here now together.

As the sun works down Mt. Figueroa

and the afternoon grows long with bottles,

we have to agree that for the people who came before us,

we haven’t a single idea.

VI.

My father and I are standing in the basement again,

and while he makes his way

through a stack of undated photographs

I’m remembering when we played air guitar to George Thorogood

and he still felt like a young man.

Tonight he’s slurring, and because of his bad hip

he leans on the cabinet.

The photos are blurry, shot hastily

on the day they closed on the house.

There is no grass, the yard is dirt, and men with moustaches

and women with big hair

pitch horseshoes and drink beer in the front yard.

I lean in to watch him flip through images

that bring tears to his eyes.

The photos are simple shots:

A brother-in-law wearing a mesh-backed baseball hat

with his arm around my father

pretends to kiss him on the cheek.

My mother sits in a lawn chair in the garage

with my father’s sister. They are young and tan, laughing.

There I am, sometimes in a diaper, sometimes naked,

toddling through the dirt,

blonde I don’t recognize on my own head,

can coolers hugging my arms, a costume.

In one, I watch a bubble I’ve blown float away.

A long time ago, my father says,

staring into backgrounds beside me.

I remember him in overalls and a cowboy hat,

walking through the fields around the house,

long before there was a neighborhood.

I remember him worried about coyotes

and the dogs, watching geese and pheasants

from the back window. I remember pressing my forehead

to the glass

of the front door and waiting for him

to come home.

A long time ago, he returns, but not much has changed.

Monica Berlin