Kohelet

My grandmother remembers ancestry. She used to speak of a distant aunt

who died as a child on the prairie; “Her name,” I was told,

“I can’t remember. But I once saw it written in the front leaf

of a family Bible.” Her short life was five years

of the nineteenth century. She fell into a boiling laundry barrel.
(What floral dress was she wearing, how open

was the dry blue sky, and did the stucco roof sag

with the steam of her dying?) “Life was hard on the prairie.”

Maybe it’s blood that stained her death into my mind.

Even as a child I imagined my distant grandmother,

damp and warm, cradling the red body of her daughter.

(Perhaps death lingered for days, a week, and a hundred miles away

lived another farmer who owned a stethoscope

and books about cholera, the herbal solution

for childhood croup.) The world was a brown expanse then.

What could be done? What minister could pray?

I imagined that grandmother watched the horizon like it was Sodom

and Gomorrah; I imagined her motionless and regretful

like a pillar of salt—and not wailing, “Vanity! Vanity!” as a storm

gathered over her cabin to water the land.

(So there was a child burned, a mother and a muddy grave.)

Isn’t that something new under the sun?

The world feels round with repetition, which is everywhere

like desire. I have always felt distinct.

My grandmother taught ancestry for perspective, as if to say,

“Your great-grandchildren will remember you,” as if to promise

I would be the father of many nations. I have always felt distinct,

and God holds secrets close to his heart.

In another Bible, my grandmother has her own list of names in cursive—

even the letters joined together like ribbons in a cyclone:

the spin of birth, marriage, death, birth,

marriage, death. The churning power is repetition.

I can’t think but that I will alter the cycle, which is surely destructive.

(The prairie has storms that can raze the foundations of a home.)

The life I have to live is not written down anywhere. “For in much wisdom

is much grief: increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.”

In another Bible, maybe it was Lot that froze in a saline column,

while his wife looked back at the wicked city she loved.

As the flames reddened her face, maybe she agreed with Solomon

that escape, like “everything,” is meaningless.