Is it just the space, the vacancy of him --
that I love what I know, worship what I don't --
that makes me see my deaf grandfather always
in a gesture of departure, of leaning forward, slightly
turned, about to sign something that would never come?
What makes me remember my father, deaf, pale,
almost lemony in a dusklight crossing an Indianapolis
diner doorway, the only white man for a mile in a cowboy hat
and embroidered boots, singing for me while he signed,
gesturing to the cadence of a slow, pitchless voice
under the striped slants of patched awnings nodding
over yellow windows and glass doorways flashing
in the late-day sun.Is that how it was?
Was I a black boy walking from fourth grade
on a liquor-store street, in the shut-down, exasperated hollows
where corner vendors haggled behind makeshift racks pieced
together by duct tape and a hustle?Were the walls flamboyant,
graffiti caked in arcs of fuzzy crimson over the half-moon smiles
of postered real-estate spokesmen, the paint byzantine
with symbols and emblems, studded medallions dangling from gold
chains of fuck you and fuck the man, my father
considering the knock-off persian rugs and sloppy
ceramics tilted there beside the polish of mock porcelain,
an egyptian vase gluedwith sparkles, knick-knacks gorgeous yet cheap,
because they were things you would have to make?
Who can tell me why, after my Grandfather, a white man
I can hardly bring back, hunched with Alzheimer's in a worn wheelchair
by a picture window, the poplars always talking
to him with their hundred hands, why I can only remember
delicious air fogging the dusty showcase windows of a second-hand
furniture store, wet smoke lifting off the ribs of a steel barrel grille,
that eldritch swirl through the soap spray of the carwash, stinging
the low eyes of children playing hooky, leaving
the mildewed seven-eleven with one-dollar sackfuls
of gum and tootsie-rolls?What if it didn't happen this way?
What if the only sweet thing was my father holding my hand,
helping me into shotgun in his seventy-three camarro,
until we burned up the interstate? Suppose with me, for a moment,
that in a cloudshift, say, he had my Grandfather's profile,
his brim-blotched hat perfected in a bleach of sunlight.
Maybe it was like a reverie of hey-days, a childhood's cheap thrill
that keeps the heart thumping give it back, give it back, demanding
some beautiful thing to punctuate into the past by its small amnesias,
its exaggerations, something gorgeous yet yours, a thing
you would have to make.

Poem to the Son I Do Not Have
By Frank Gallimore

I’d like to have told you to have faith
In beauty, for otherwise it does not exist.
Now I would wake into a morning freighted
With the firelight of death, the leaves,
Like crinkled pages turning backward on
The grass, the blackened winter leaves, foundered
In featureless space, scouring wet
Loam, the sere leaves fingering the ground.
Now ice settles in soil of skin and dust
And houses, struck by fierce lamplight, glisten
Their pocks with tears. Now bare twilight and guttered
Filaments of sun ring absent shapes
Of silence. I’d like to have told you of bodies
Caught and frayed with light that dappled backs
Of salamanders low in streams, my grandfather,
Dimly-lit in light that sieved cedars,
Refracted crooked frames to carousels
On the wall.I’d like to have told you
About my father in 1981,
Elbowing me in the rusted blue buick,
Knee-steering, humming with deaf voice,
Toneless, with one hand rising to interstate
Wind, the other swung out in signed English,
Humming Annabelle Lee and I was a child
In this kingdom by the sea.1981
And the car a cobalt tongue in the mouth of the driveway,
The trunk a gleaming maw stuffed and taped
With cardboard boxes and manilla suitcases.
There was the road and the gravel and the broken mailbox
Among tufts of daises.There was the leaning of the tree
Riddled with our nails and there were wet shoes
And there was thin rain and there was dew
Heavy on the tops of petals and leaves and the blades
Of uncut grass.We disappeared along
A slick, tar-strewn road of fractured
Asphalt, overgrown with furrows of crabgrass,
A road of tossing debris and muddy clouds.
We disappeared in fogged blurs of motels
White as wintered Nebraska, mildew-cornered
And yellow-encrusted and all door and stair and window,
Window, window.

The rooms have gone quiet as a failed heart.
At the end of eighty years, the body of my deaf
Grandfather crashed like leaves, crashed after dancing
In the home yard, signing with trees, before God
Or a cloud, great and useless, raised the earth
With snow. I am here on deranged soil.
It is built of bone and husks of leather.
It is built of nocturnal dust,
Broken shucks of feathered skin, jawless
Skull-sockets and dried femurs and all
The memorabilia of the ghost-inhabited trees.
In 1981, the buick engine
Sputters on the roadside. A long chain
At the end of a white truck heaves it up
And out from the hood and something is shimmering in the air.
A plane, bright as the sun, glides in the sun
Like a sparrow's dream. The mechanic, dressed in oil
And gray, hunched over his bucket engrossed
With ratchets, misses it. And my father in the oil-flecked bathroom,
Clearing his face in ivory lumps of foam,
Misses it. Shimmer again as it dies past
A thread of dusk. I hear the razor tap,
Imagine hairs flaked into the yellow drain,
The pull of the famished blade against my father’s
Cheek, trace the curled lip I inherited,
The deaf ears I did not. Does it matter,
Father, that I cried, you sliding
Forward twice the saw of your right
Thick-fingered hand across your
left palm, which means it’s all right,
It’s all right? Two fingers now,
For you, for me, back and forth, you
And me. You and me can go, he said,
One hand flat against the other
And sliding off into the air. You
And me can go together. Two fists
Together like twin doves. Together.I
Would like to have told you to have faith in beauty
For otherwise it does not exist.
1981 and arthritic
Doors lay bent and rusted over, a crust
Of red cradled in broken hinges, itinerant
Leaves skidding across indifferent steel
And out of memory.The sound was almost
Like the breathing of the interstate,
Almost like the sea.

Flood After Flood
By Frank Gallimore
--for my family, all of whom are deaf but me

Yards fill up with the night.I stumble past
boxcars where the Willamette slips back in and out
of itself, with beavers turning back and forth
amongst the swells.I come slipping down
the mud bank, steeper now the flood has gone,
down past the tidemark, almost to the sunken
dock where a log once lay half buried in
the grass.Laid low across moon-spattered water,
a tree plows by through swollen curlicues,
where someone pays a line into the water
from the withered deck of a yellow house.
A gray winter comes.Parents, circling,
wind-beaten, down the paths with wedded arms,
go watching as the sun falls down
across the river.Currents at the brim
now, near the window, lick the wind-swept wall.
I slip again, mud down the length of my pants
and come nearly crashing the perfect
surface like an idiot.And nothing
moves; the august birds are gone.The washed
bank slinks from silted roads, all swept
and sunken where barn roofs crashed like cymbals
in the loosened dirt.The full river
murmurs in its drifts.I see in dappled
glints improbable pigeons printing
a thousand hands, anonymous, on water.
Suddenly, I come almost to tears.

It holds no blemish but what light would give,
what scars it with December trees and fall’s
extinguished amber grace turned all to sticks,
rain-slicked and jutting from the bank into
reflections, like the past’s flooded moments
of former green.There was a time, I thought,
when I was deaf, in the private sense of the word,
in simpler terms, no stranger to my own.
There was a time, I thought, I was a member,
before it closed within a wake like any
insubstantial quay, the swept mind
floating back its chosen fragments, mountains
faded, fields all cropped with neighborhoods
of time.I blotch the currents with the face
of one who folds his way into the years.
I see them everywhere inside the water,
languages of those few trees that give
their fingers to the cloudbreak, where the flood
has interfered and made them lucky now, first
for coming winter’s browned and separate music.
It seems I’m always lodged between the day
and all the deafness that had come before.
Another hour accomplishes the splendid
motion of loss.Here, it used to be
a beautiful place.At least it seemed that way.
But the river stays immaculate, gulping
waste and showing nothing but what is.
A beaver sinks into the hole of its
reflection.I am lucky too, speaking,
hearing this music all these years.My sister
descends her granite steps to read the evening
and all the violet music there.Somewhere,
where runneled sidewalks gloam with midnight traffic
my brother turns a plastic street for parades,
frenetic compensation of the night.
And it’s a good and lucky night, coiling
down and far between each one of us.

I come back up the bank.I thank the flood
returning to my life, that which will
exhaust these leaves again.There are the broken
rain bottles and there are the wild places
of the broken field, lodged detritus washed
from miles away, toilet seats and fishing
rods and lamps from older moments, drowned
and given back like all that tells us
of the foreign things that we no longer are.
Lodged between neon passages
of airports, dreaming over velvet seats,
confused and towered tenements, I see
my hands pull back from me at night, plunged
and eddied back to reverie, to caved
tree-houses where all my language moved
in these reflections churning back like love.
The flood will have us soon and give us back,
as children go and die within their names,
the moving mind, complicit, moving on
with currents pushing northward through the heart,
the fogged dock slowly dwindling in
the flood, the past still rising up the verge
to find its way into our separate lives.

Three Poems
By Frank Gallimore

I.

Please.

Please.

Let the confetti drop.
Let the man lift up his slick brass horn

and play for me

something high.

The boulevard's wet alleys thicken with marvelous debris.
Trash blows between the feet of the rich,
who are thinking of nothing, and the poor, who are thinking
of everything, a stupor of words, a scintillation.
At moonlit night, workmen, laddered against busted tenements,
string each one with a scatter of paper lamps.
The buildings seem to spread in their twinkling,
draped as certain as mansions in the turning light,
while the fantastic grins of masked and tasseled creatures
hook and revolve on the street, like little whirling lies.

Please.

I know they're lies.

Let the man lift up his slick brass horn

and lie to me.

When your deaf brother steps off the bus,
a violet hue gathers on him, a muslin shroud.
Behind feathered eyelets, dancing in a rain
of teased ribbons, your sister tilts and cocks her heel.
Drums clap and clatter on top of them,
both deaf but passing, pulsing to the syncopation
under their wet skin.

Please.

I know what I am.

Let me stay here, now.

I'm so tired.

Let the woman gather her arms
over my tired shoulders,

as if she loves me.

Stiletto heels press down on the delicate night
a hooker's shadow snaking into the hundred arms
of a thronged street.Your head turns its wheel
of need and vibration, spewing adjectives from your dry lips
like points of plastic light in the perfect dark.
Poor you.You're trying to sing now.A song
thick and glittered with despair, jangling
with the freight of verbs your brother and sister
will never hear.

Stop.

Please.

Stop.

II.

Summer in a cluttered basement of a run-down house.
By the lifted window, daylight stoops and frays
across the pale opening and clasping of my father's hands.
With a callused thumb, he rubs his forehead and flicks it down.
Remember, he signs, your rook, your knight, your king.
The volute figures glint and angle across a checkered shawl
as if it were a dancefloor.My father's fingers whisper
against each other with the accurate elegance of legs.
Twist, turn, double back.The joints budge.
Remember.Remember.Remember.(Years later,
something would drop in another room and I would rise,
feeling the callus on my thumbs, to tell my father
there was someone at the door.Though there was no
mysterious visitor, and no one to sign it to.)
My father considers the round heads of pawns
inching square by perfect square.A fan whirs nervously.
When he signs to me that the important thing
is that you keep swaying, keep swaying and you could almost
make it home, I can almost swear the room, this moment,
is something I can turn between my palms.
I'm ten years old, Daddy.

Check.Check.Checkmate.

III.

My eyes open a flocked scene of dancers,
of skirts twirling in pinwheels of dragonish hues.
A woman is touching up her make-up in a polished mirror.
Somebody's wearing a vintage zoot suit.
Beginners slowdrag, anxious, along the back wall,
past the sparkling of the mirror where a net of bodies
casts itself out and out.I am one
of my other faces now, one of my other hands,
brooding over the notion of home again, hitchhiking
the ballroom floor, itching to glide the hand
on my shoulder into a waltz of love and regret.
Overhead speakers croon foxtrots and lindy-hops,
a rumba slow and steady as forgetfulness,
in the damp cling and linger of palm against palm
and the difference a finger makes
beneath a velvet shoulder blade, each nudge
the torso's question and answer.
What makes you think you know me now,
wheeling through hot space, the plasticly lit
ballroom an arid oven, suddenly lurching
with elaborate camels?What am I, if not
nothing?A quick hand, a quicker heart
in a jitterbug of sleights, jazz, and tears?
Turning left and right, I'm reaching
as if I could pull Armstrong, Sinatra, Lady Day
into the crowded midnight, and have them teach me
how to walk all over again.(Remember, they'll say,
your rock-step, your nod, your cling.)Am I only the music
swinging the dancers' frantic knees from one perfect step
to another?Am I the hips' switch and turn
that sways me just far enough to get beyond myself,
while, when the music stops, somebody hesitates, then folds
himself across a woman's arced body, a thing so close
it might almost be all you would ever need?

Please.

Let the woman lean into my hands, now,
because I am going to dream of other things.

Let the man lift up his slick brass horn
and play something low.

Didn't you know?

If you want to get to heaven from this world,
baby, you got to learn how to dance.

Raintime Over Dog-Boy
By Frank Gallimore

Away from the city, at the fair, a ferris wheel revolved its shade
across dust that weaved women and men.
I turned my head to jugglers, hot potato, someone skipping hopscotch
in the cold wind, wild where pinwheels flashed,
the whole iridescent rink turning like the confused spiral
a girl's hair made against the stripes
of sideshow curtains as they came apart, the halves skirting back,
and through the loose rattle of bars
burst the manic snarl of Dog-Boy in a back-lit cage.
A drizzle began, vague droplets misting
the pavement black.A cloud cut the sun in half.Boys and girls, leaping
into the tent, spun in wild laughter,
while, on the light-splashed stage, a spot-lit woman's rainbow profile
turned into a man's.Watching siamese twins
share a heart, they gathered under the dim canopy
spattering with rain like a kettledrum.
They held each other from the widened cold as the stuffed bust
of a two-headed bull held both sides of the tent
in its gaze.Neither dog nor boy, half-true under the business of gliding curtains,
the dizzy room throngedwith strange stares,
a musical whine rose anonymous from the spectacle, rose in the splintered light.
At seventeen, just beginning to write,
I was alone with the confusion of myself.At twenty-two, I can still see,
outside, rattling loosely left to right
into tunnels and backland, boxcars chased by dogs, slicing mist into the rain.
Is there nothing so different now
than when I couldn't take it anymore, walking from the tent into the storm,
the city miles away, and the thought of you
coming apart in a cold and doubtful wind?Rain burst over redbuds then,
magnolias and stargazers.The sun's stare,
splintered with rain, kept the trees and locusts from unraveling into night.
Music was playing.Down a gravel road,
a pelted diner kept its light on and aluminum trailers silvered side by side.
Under the wet banners of another awning,
a man was holding a woman like a pillow.He held her the way the ground
held the water down.He held her
like a long, hard sleep.Under stars and stripes, love and pain were having it out
in every song, and he held her
as if she were half himself, as if the jukebox were the only thing left
to hold the world together.