Mother promised her gift to my sister and me was no matter if we wanted her to or not, right after she’d die, she’d hurry back as a steaming bowl of split pea soup or a glass flute of champagne toasting her name day or any occasion that called for bare-legs dancing in bright purple half-slips or running barefoot through snow, screaming as we touch-tagged the nearest tree then turned to run inside the wood-heated house, each log sputtering in sluggish code. She promised to find some way to tell us what it was really like to die, but in the meantime, we’d have to learn to endure loneliness and long dark halls until a crow cawed or the wooden banister knocked back.

For two nights my sister and I whispered Mamo, mu z toboyu –Mother, we’re here with you, into two long nights, finger-stroked her hair away from the fevered aged child face, took turns pressing our foreheads against hers, skin of our skin, listened as through a glass held to a wall.

The morning she died we arrived to find a waxy vinyl curtain encircling her bed protecting her from strangers’ eyes, airborne germs, the stifling August air we leaned into to take in at peace – eyes closed, her mouth unlocked, sprung open like a large locket.

Did she cross the ash bridge to my father beaming as a newlywed, meeting her again after twenty-nine years, aged as she or the same as the day he died?  Did he remember to bring an empty hard-shelled suitcase, the brass-trimmed traveling alarm, her favorite white satin autograph dachshund — for years unsigned?  Was Grandmother there at the window, unseen to the rest of us, sifting through morning light, dressed in her floor-dusted apron around her thick waist, the last word in the argument she and Mother started fifty years ago on her lips?

There were no secret notes for us inscribed in her skin, in the tiny blue veins of her eyelids, or scripted in her gray-tipped hair flared across the pillow.  It looked as if she simply stopped wherever she was, whatever she was thinking or doing, where ever she thought she could still walk to if held up by her arms. She simply stopped, her face turned slightly to the right as if she were listening to something distant. In her hands she clutched a soft leather pouch — God, she would have said.

Even in China, the fans no longer

give a damn about Deep Purple’s last world

tours, but our town’s Middle School band

conductress still showcases the song,

pushing the tempo fast, baton raised,

under arms swinging fiercely

like hammocks

in a Midwest storm.

Once, cheerleader-sexy under bleachers

in cold November air,

the pride of our county

is now a dry-cleaner’s

hot ticket sweating profusely

in a starched three-quarter-sleeved

white jacket.

The horn section seems to suffer

most – black slacks, starched shirts

wafting Axe – hair water slicked,

ears, cheeks flaming red,

eyes burning through sheet music,

every note blown cavernous

into just some adult shit song.

Disperse the smoke,

Drain the water.

Long stripped of Purple’s

leather pants and sooty asses,

parents love her song choice.

It signals the end of the school year,

dented rental instruments turned in,

locked all summer in their metal cages.

As long as they start and end together,

doesn’t matter what they play in between.

My husband’s own favorite:

Any one hurt?

We fold our programs, let out a collective

discreet sigh of relief, smile as we file

to our cars, a light drumming of rain

on the hoods –

Did we really think we’d ever lose

those heavy booted chords?

No turning back

the worn tape rattles

the car’s speakers’ bass blast,

windshield wipers slashing

the short ride home.

Every Friday my father’s voice, drunk

on plum Slivovitz, rose from our basement

through the heating vent on my bedroom floor,

not a Blue Jay’s warble–a deeper velvet

vibrato, like the color of his eyes.

Careful not to step on a crack

that would give me away,

I’d creep down, peek over the café

swinging saloon doors.

Alternating three minor chords,

he’d strum his guitar, lips pursed,

angelic as an adult Hummel figurine,

hold each note until each word released

from the luscious center, stretched

like taffy into a Boulevard of Broken Dreams

or Once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-tavern.

Across from him, my mother, shoulders back–

black turtle-necked, black stocking-ed legs

crossed and wrapped around a bar stool–

poured herself another half glass

of Schwartze Katz wine,

the small insignia plastic black cat

dangling from the bottle’s neck.

She’d lean toward him, cautiously,

as if he were a wren that could

be easily frightened away.

She’d plead please play

the sad song again — the one

about the village girl who, to flout her mother’s warning,

slipped into night to meet her moody lover,

but not before first inspecting

her reflection in the family’s well.

Pushing her hair away from her face

to check the curve of her cheek,

she leaned over too far, fell in,

and no one heard her cries,

and no one wept in chorus.

2.

Once, I was caught spying on them–

envying their adult fun earned crossing

the ocean from Kiev to New York,

then down long back roads to Ohio–

I was supposed to be asleep

and out of their way.

But I wanted to hear my father’s voice,

see my mother fall in love with him again

as he carefully plucked the strings

that now look rusted, tainted,

medieval–as if they could slice

through thick bread or a hard wheel of cheese,

or could send an arrow flying.

They could cut fingers, too,

if the player didn’t know how to press them

properly, fingertips angled just right,

nails evenly trimmed.

I was sent immediately to bed.  No second

goodnight, no quick cup of water.

3.

In the Scituate Music Shop,

a young guitarist-salesman holds Father’s guitar up

to the window.  He says the neck is warped.

The strings are shot from human sweat–

not enough alcohol rubbed on them over the years.

I could replace the strings,

but they’d barely sound against the badly damaged frets.

He turns it upside down and shakes it

until my father’s Lucite pick

falls out like a tooth.

Silvertone: Sears and Roebuck, he mumbles. Catalogue ordered

in the 50’s.  There were a lot of them back then.

It was not the guitar I imagined my father bartered

from gypsies and carried through harsh winters

with barely a shield to protect it,

the one he and my mother made love next to

for the first time, the guitar

propped on the bed next to them,

the large tear-shaped guard

and wooden bridges

I thought I was born of.

Instead, it’s 1959.  My father sits near their bedroom window,

his black glasses perched at the end of his nose:

Doc Orlowsky of Brunswick

prudently studying each guitar,

imagining the weight of its wooden body

in his lap,

his left hand circled around the neck,

fingers poised, right arm resting heavily.

He decides on the one pictured slung over

the shoulder of a Midwest cowboy,

the guitar sturdy enough to take,

if need be, to a fall-out shelter.

4.

The salesman continues to tilt the guitar

in every direction, shake it violently,

upside down, like an obstetrician, as if to make it cry

or to force whatever was still wedged or stubborn

out of the sound hole:

my mother’s shiny bobby pins loosened

from her hair – no, further:

Mother, herself, hanging

onto her wine glass,

Father reaching deep,

fingers stretched into a seventh chord,

to find his soul –

fur hat,

cowboy hat,

a bird.

Not bad, he says,

for what they were.

I don’t know if he means the guitar

or my parents.

He twists the tuning pins with pliers

to see if, one last time, they might budge

then, resigned, lifts my father’s Silvertone over the glass

counter case.  Handing it over to me,

it’s now as weightless as a stingy bouquet of carnations

presented at the end of a paltry recital.

Good luck, he says.

It’s so light I can barely carry it.