by Trina Burke

 

Who is my mom’s secret first husband

to me? No more a landscape feature

than the Zuiderzee. What can I say? I caved

when asked for a family

history. They are to me a collective

mystery, a game that is a book

in which we all write results

that are as strange to us as a dull butter knife

with its florid handle patina

obscuring bright plating, for special occasions only,

in a family that celebrates nothing.

 

And if my father could never be anything

but a used car salesman,

telling stories that are not strictly true

and in which we all wish to believe, then he did

wreck a corvette in Lake Spear,

then I am the one with the German mother,

then the waves in the sea

are the built-up energy of a finity of shad tails

swishing and have nothing to do with you or the moon.

There is no noun for my relation to a wave of the sea.

 

For salt is neither a texture thing nor

a question of taste. It is simply right

with the rightness of a baker baking. Allspice

does not encompass all spices,

it is no part cardamom, contains no mace.

It’s a hard hat to hold onto in a hurricane, yes,

but we were never meant to stand against gale force winds.

We are wily, we go to ground when we recognize

that our buildings weren’t built to code. We know

that we are Dasein, and this place at which we have arrived

is unheimlich. Only the call and response of a pair of cranes

might render it familiar. Only

the hen’s egg dropped too soon in the soup.