Compass and Clock. David Sanders

The Lake

       Lascaux

       A Wash

       One

       Pianos

      I saw them as a child,

      in the houses of people my parents knew,

      each one sulking in a darkened room

      beneath arrangements of family portraits.

      There I’d lift the lip

      that pouted over chipped and yellowed teeth

      and slightly press the lowest key

      enough so that the bass note hummed through me.

      I never heard the hours

      of tortured practice or those mornings when

      dusting hands stopped to tour again

      the foreign shore of a half-remembered strain.

      So much that wasn’t played,

      the silence resonating like the dusk

      that ushers out the fall, and yet

      the portraits in their frames have multiplied.

      Furniture now of friends,

      undisturbed and undisturbing, the strings

      ease further out of tune against

      the padded hammers waiting to be sprung.

       The Mummy’s Curse

      “We’d settled in to watch The Mummy’s Curse,”

      the pastor at my father’s funeral

      informed us, speaking of his Dublin youth

      and to our fear of everlasting life.

      A silent film projector that his uncle

      owned was set up in the front hall parlor

      where everyone could see. They drew the shade,

      a makeshift screen, which blocked the city lights,

      and waited to be scared. When soon, undead,

      somnambulant, the mummy left its tomb,

      trailing its banners of embalmer’s gauze,

      the room filled with expected gasps and shrieks.

      “But then we heard these otherworldly moans,

      and more with every step the monster took.

      The moans grew loud—a chorus from beyond.”

      They pushed the bravest of them out the door

      and there he saw, like frozen carollers,

      some passersby who, mesmerized in fright

      by what they witnessed played out on the shade,

      shared in the fear of those who watched indoors:

      all scared of what was on the other side.

      “But that was death made animate,” he said,

      “and rightly feared, not any kind of life.”

      That was in Florida, my father’s final home.

      The pastelled friends, whom he had hardly known,

      had come to pay respects. The following day,

      we took him north, to where we used to live.

      Once, since then, I had some business there

      and made a side trip back to tend the grave.

      Recent rains had soaked our family plot,

      a low spot in the village cemetery

      where the marker sat, a small boat moored

      amid a large and motionless flotilla.

      But there would be no rising from the dead.

      I thought of what the pastor had implied,

      and what my brother, later, graveside, said,

      whispering, “Everyone we knew is here.”

      To prove him wrong, I shook the spring chill off

      and stuck a flower in the muck before

      I drove away to look for those I knew

      had staked their claims not far from here and where

      I’d seen them last, when we were all still young

      and on the cusp of things not named or known.

      The maple-lined road I’d driven countless times

      strobed in flickering bands of sun and shadows;

      familiar houses shrank behind additions.

      I had my bearings then that day but no

      directions, and I wound up out of town

      at an orchard farm I’d known of as a boy

      to see if they might have the lost addresses

      of those who in my mind were so nearby.

      The woman working the syrup and cider shop

      looked up and asked me how I was. “I’m fine,”

      I said. “We haven’t seen you in a while,”

      she grinned, telling me her maiden name.

      And then I understood the sculptors’ claim

      of finding the shape within the stone, and saw

      the girl I’d known twenty-five years before.

      We talked a while about our lives, our jobs,

      before she told me where I had to go.

      But even now I can’t get past the fact

      she recognized without a moment’s thought

      my face unseen by her since I’d left school.

      I, who traveled far afield, put streets

      between us, languages and lives and years,

      returned to her and to the rest, no doubt,

      untouched by time. The change was theirs, it seemed,

      incremental as an orchard’s growth,

      but real. And I, like the unlucky dead,

      would gladly move among them as their own.

       Contrivance

      National Arboretum

      Consider these trees,

      stationed on their slatted stands,

      tended centuries

      and trained to be small.

      Root-pruned and limb-wired—such

      techniques could enthrall

      the quietest mind.

      Appetite renders distant

      the spruce one might find

      clinging to a cliff

      or maples burnished by wind,

      positing as if

      on