April, Baby

•

I      Springfield, Missouri, the Ozarks,1950

Daffodils and jonquils and crocus showed up for Easter
and we, awkward, posed for photos
in new church clothes. Sun grins, both of us.

Purple and golden iris bloomed on the south side of the house
where you liked to sit, cross-legged, petting Brownie the First.
Nobody could see you in that garden.

I, myself, preferred putting food coloring in glasses
to see if the creamy jonquils would turn
to scarlet, cobalt, Crayola yellow.

I can see those iris leaves so clearly even today.
The place I hid the cap gun I stole from Stanley.
As if you and I were twins: Trouble and Escape.

II      Western Minnesota 2007

Winter Storm Watch on the prairie.
The wind drives icy specks of snow against my face.

Willows along the creek have already opened their cat paws.
A new black calf shadows her mother along the fence line.

No daffodils in sight, I pick a willow branch
to take home to the vase that holds the lupine pods,

larger than willows but just as soft, wolf willows I call them.
Picked the summer you wandered off, two years ago.

On the way back, I notice my footprints in deepening snow,
not straight and parallel like a runner's.

No. The path looks as if alien ducks have descended,
waddled, webbed feet splayed.

I'm the only one here, so these footprints must be mine.
Or did you return to surprise me?

III      Wales 2001

Daffodils open early to the light winds of
the Gulf Stream, greening soft days.

Did our own lost ancestors
bring these flowers along

to their new worlds, along with their other passions-
exuberant song and travel and drink, too much drink?

Or did they simply settle down in lands that looked
familiar, New Zealand, Ozark mountains?

I like to think they brought you and me
our love of wind and stars.

IV      South Minneapolis 2005

At your memorial service, two years ago,
purple lupine, spruce and pine branches sprayed
out of your yellow kayak, which took the place of

a casket. The smell brought the wilderness inside.
It was July, anyway, far too late for daffodils.
Almost too late for spring lupine. No matter.

Maybe I'm the only one who remembered you
in the childhood garden, south side of the house.
Maybe I'm imagining things, anyway, like my

memory of you in a golden jacket standing backlit
at the windows of Orr Books, listening to me read--
poems on a late Sunday afternoon in winter light.

That was the only time you showed yourself for poetry,
your image a locket over my heart.
Others who loved you carry different lockets: a song,

a stone, a half-smile at the door... Yet all agree the lupine
spraying out of the kayak-and the wavy blue silk under it-
made a spectacular tribute, a still life

to send you off, God speed.

V      Nebraska Migrations 2003

I didn't drive to Nebraska with you,
blasting Neil Young to hear the whoosh
and racket of the Sand Hill Cranes.

You were, for a moment, happy
when you described them to me.
The rush of their wings

comes at you like a tornado, and then
you look up at the thousands of them-
it's un-fucking-believable.

I regret now I couldn't go with you.
I'd had to keep a distance from your van,
smoked with cigarettes and sarcasm.

Last Easter, I finally saw some.
Sand Hill Cranes, I mean, in Wisconsin,
walking along the Ice Age Trail.

They were awkward, big, and creaky-
like those driftwood sculptures
that once paraded San Francisco Bay.

They brought back your story:

how you experienced the grace of flight.

VI      Antigua, Guatemala, Lent 2006

I followed a parade, plastic iris and daffodils
blooming at the tomb of Our Señor of the Sepulcher.

Mary lifted her arms and hands up towards the tomb,
appropriately mournful in Her Solitude.

I'm sick and tired of people asking,
Where is his body?

I swear: Mary was smiling at the flowers.
Didn't care if they were plastic or real.

VII      Minneapolis Birthday 2007

You would've been 60 today, the day
I used to think was Flag Day. Purple iris
preferable to the red, white and blue.

I would've liked to have flown in,
from the Ozarks, some daffodils and iris
to this white barren spring.

Or a new puppy. Brownie the Third.

VIII      Jerusalem 2007

How strange that your death hooks up
with the story of the missing body

of Jesus, you who cursed church forever
as soon as you escaped

the beatings in His Holy Name.

IX      Minneapolis Solitude 2007

Today I do what is mine to do: spring cleaning.
Wash the daffodil tea cup from Wales
and the one with hawthorn blossoms.

Ten years ago in Wales I slept in a stone house
next to a cloud of flowering hawthorn.
My dreams unrolled a creamy scroll, a family tree

of many generations: our ancestors were lupine
and other flowers I couldn't quite make out, standing in
for all the ancestors who refused to speak of their past.

A new family tree, as in: beautiful in mountains.
Adaptable to flowering anywhere in the world.
More appealing than our taciturn, ribald gene pool.

Everybody loves lupine, just as everyone
loved you. Except for the times
your silence drove them crazy.

XI      After April, Pine Lake 2007

Search and Rescue is going out again
to look for you, their second anniversary trek.

Your disembodied voice: I was asleep a long time
but I'm awake now. I see a picture

of you sleeping, even though I'm the one who sleeps.
You're settled and curled in the duff, under pines,

your head resting on your right arm, your face
relaxed, your hair mingling with spring shoots of

violets, fiddlehead ferns, trillium, anemones,
not unlike our childhood garden.

Now you're walking towards me,
wearing the same gold colors you wore at Orr Books.

Even though I've said, for two years now, I don't need his body
to do my mourning, I'm suddenly desperate

to touch your arms, muscled and tan as you were
at twenty, ready to set off for Jackson Hole.

I want to rub your arms with both my hands, up and down
as though I were starting a fire.

You recede as I reach to touch you

•

for my brother, Lloyd Harold Skelton, born April 14, 1947, who disappeared June 4, 2005, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area. Search and Rescue found his clothes but not his body.