(Dedicated to finding my sister Mona who was separated from me for 54 years)

DIRECTIONAL ABSTRACTIONS

It’s best that I shoulder into dawn
With my backside tracking with the maples moss behind
Peering at my neck and thighs.
We indoctrinate our memories with a
Mixture of experience testifying
That the moss is winters sweater to the prevailing
Snow swirling to quicken the pace
Of leaving here and going there…
I’ve long been haunted by the bitter walk back home
When the wind tweezers my bare face
And if I brace to widen in my scarf and hat
With sentences you seeded with my thoughts while making coffee
As misleading as numbing blasts of February’s air
Nags at me for things I should have said
To trance your cooking supper
Or tasting pepper without salt.
Something like the insulated trick of lining shaking window panes With undulated roles of old newspapers…
Oh! Things like that catalyst connections
Which I know I failed to make by simple talk.
Yet, in that talk I know germinates an aura of personality
To domino suppositions
Of what I’d wished to let you know that somethings make us Special…
Mother reconnoited roots when shopping on the avenue
By memorizing turns and corners.
Father’s world was free handed on the last
Supper napkins with doodled schematics of
Where the copper wires branched off
In windows on tomorrow’s job.
I saw the world in all their maps
Erasing any complicated curve or corner.
Only in my search for you Mona
Did my thoughts freeze in place,
With a growing understanding
That you were east or west
Of a prime meridian I never understood in school;
As evasive and as mystifying as
Tracing lines of longitude
Bewildered by the endless maze
Which text books labeled as lines of latitude-
In a vortex across miles measured as kilometers;
Where even pioneers got lost
In finding the very places
Where gold was pebbled
On California river banks
And steppes of Montana wheat
Billowed in the morning light;
Moving men to write of heaven…
I can leave you with the moss
And hope you’ll remember me
As well as the one who pointed to the north
And the one who alerted you at dawn
To the balm of rainy spring afternoons;
Riding on the westerlies.
Always a stop or two away from home,
A full week after I’m gone –
Still mystified by how high the Prime Meridian
Would have to be
To fly above the Equator.

Ken Siegelman
Brooklyn Poet Laureate
November, 2008