Can You Whitewash the Spirit?
Question posed on a church storefront near
Niles, Michigan
1.
Day lily, sumac, locust, burr oak, honeysuckle,
cottonwood, maple, wild rose, daisy, Queen Anne's lace,
black-eyed Susan, cedar, purple phlox,
bull thistle, hollyhock, sweet pea, May apple
A floral litany blooming
in train track ditches across Missouri, Illinois, Michigan.
Thunder heads spiked by lightning.
The patter of rain sharp against glass.
Dark river dirt and eroded river valleys.
Corn plants just a few inches high.
Hay baled into loaves, ready for winter.
The engineer laying on the whistle,
murmuring like a mother soothing her child.
Deer, crow, buzzard, grouse, hawk, wild turkey,
little white heron, golden eagle
Gang graffiti, elaborate with secret meaning,
modern-day cave art spray painted on bridge abutments,
rail cars, tunnels.
A degraded, desecrated landscape
of abandoned factories and warehouse,
scrap yards, quarries, swaths of herbicide-sprayed
railroad right-of-ways.
An ailanthus tree, green, defiant.
In all the podunk towns seeking a date,
in the cornerstones of old brick buildings with windows gaping -
1854, 1861, 1891, 1907, 1916 -
establishing this wreck, that ruin
as something they could have glanced at
- a going concern then -
along the route they traveled in 1917
out of Leadwood escaping
the burning crosses and gunfire night after night.
The animal fear
of any varmint hunted and not wanted
staining the armpits of their cheap shirts and serviceable dresses.
Antoni and Ewa Pacosz, nee Cholody
Their children: Mary, Frank, Stanley, Walter, Janina
And a baby girl, name forgotten, dead from Spanish flu.
2. Polish Home
Jednosci zgoda
To sila nasza dom
Polski z jednosz towarzystw*
Sighs carry us through
our sororal search and recovery mission,
this pilgrimage on these historied ulicaj.
Each exhale of our sadness and
Sorrow becomes the name for the breeze
blowing us down:
Kopernick, Gilbert, Otis, John Kronk,
E. Palmer, Charest, McDougal
Memory scattered like trash
before an elegiac wind.
Here our mother
witnessed pink petals scattering, foreshadowing
her cruel, elemental shattering.
There the grandfather we never knew,
a hit and run in the rainy dark,
dead on arrival at Receiving. We are still grieving.
Nothing remains but ash and ruin.
A black man on a bicycle stops,
leans in the car window and reassures us,
That's the house, you got the right one!
When he realizes we are not undercover
for Detroit PD, or The Detroit News, he grins.
We explain we are not
photographing the crack house just past
the vacant lot where they lived,
but the mute, eloquent grass.
That was a long time ago, he offers.
We smile and nod in recognition
of a mutual loss.
Dom Polski
where they fell in love that New Year's Eve
during World War II -
abandoned now -
though the cornerstone pledges this will not be so.
Unity can be a force for reconciliation, we are discovering,
possibly for the first time.
You behind the wheel of the rental car,
me with the map of the city - our beloved in ruins -
spread out on my lap like a child
we are attempting to resuscitate.
At Mt. Olivet Cemetery we tear at grass
grown over the marble slab
until their names
Mary and Anthony Kostrzewski: Busia Dziadzia
are easily read,
though our labor makes it painfully obvious,
no one does.
Fingernails black with dirt,
we scrub our hands at a nearby spigot,
then roam a grass section for the unmarked baby's grave -
that little one conceived and born too early
dead too soon
and no money for a headstone -
hoping to hear a small voice calling,
"Here, sisters, here!"
Only a flock of silent crows.
A solitary monarch.
The constant roar of planes from City Airport.
And each other.
You kneel and pray.
I collapse on the grass.
Done in by the miles we've traveled, the miles to go.
Unsure of what we want, we are ready
for whatever crosses our path:
chicory blooming by the roadside, the belch of exhaust,
sunlight filtered through the leaves of old trees,
drivers shouting, Stupid bitch, learn how to drive.
She never did, we recall, but walked the streets in all seasons, (not
on separate line)
waiting for buses:
Conant, Warren, Jefferson, Woodward, Tireman, Joy.
3. Father's Day, 1999, St. Hedwig Church, Junction Avenue
Old Spice
what we always gave him for Christmas and birthdays
scents the air, while the pelican symbolizing Christ
feeds its young.
St. Hedwig stands at the center of the marble-tiered altar,
arms out, palms up. This saint, I discover later,
is honored on October 16, the date Papa died
surrounded by flames. Mama died December 27,
the same date her firstborn was buried
in that grave we can never find.
Synchronicities are embedded in their stories
like the lead in galena our grandfather, Antoni
shoveled in Leadwood, Missouri
until Amerika ran him and our kind out.
Communicants in an unwritten liturgy,
we must learn to feed ourselves.
4. Our Lady Help of Christians
Where she graduated from eighth grade.
And years later went to a Sodality dance. The aftermath
reverberating
like a horrible war, an awful crime - rape - alive
and doing damage in our lives, our souls hostage
to her pain and anguish.
Almost 70 years to the day she clutched her diploma,
we stand on the same spot and gape at the statues
of St. Theresa, the Little Flower, and of Mary, the mother.
These icons of her piety,
mute plaster and stone witnesses.
Yes, we remember her, Sophia Anna, so in love with God, (
lighting the candles at our feet, kneeling, bowing her head,
heavy from shame and sorrow, on fire with grief,
rebelling against all of it.
Sister Fabiana, our sweet, serene guide, has embraced, this place,
this church, the same parish for almost as many decades.
"I thought I was something then, joining the Falcons
wearing gym shorts whenever I found an excuse.
To think - now - I have done this - I would have hooted
with scorn at the thought. But here I am. Proof."
5. Of the Mystery of Faith, the Strength of Belief
On Belle Isle a half-dozen or more
of the elusive miniature deer,
brown coats sleek in the last rays of the sun,
crop grass by the road near the golf course.
So trusting
despite the many cars.
Two albino deer gleam
like the iridescent interior of mussel shells
that once thrived in the nearby river.
Their coloring a testament to the genetic health of the herd.
Memory looms
like a freighter maneuvering the narrow channel.
Building a bridge to the past, it's called.
Being a witness to a living continuum.
The banal phrase life goes on alive in that fisherman
casting his line,
the union retiree picnicking.
The small green fists of bananas ripen
beneath conservatory glass. Cactus bloom.
The bells of the carillon ring out the hour.
A small girl screams
in the restroom, enjoying the echoes
of her voice.
We're looking up! Dolores says, each of us
in our separate lives
turning our gaze skyward
because the view at ground level - ground zero -
is not always good to see.
Our mothers, Italian, Polish,
packed hampers of food
and children in tow - us - hopped the bus
to this island of respite
and cool breezes.
Scores of Canada geese
raise goslings on the island now.
No forage farther north,
so a new generation
begins, here. A necessary twist
to an ancient story.
Not far from where I sit
Emma Goldman's suitcase waits
in Federico's basement.
Who will pick it up
and travel to a new world?
*Carved into the cornerstone of the abandoned Dom Polski hall on
Junction, near Michigan Avenue in Detroit. "Reconciliation of unity is
our strength. Polish Home of United Associations."