We have learned to live on different sides of the world
in the same tent. It feels as if we always knew how. My
father’s coiled in the den, surrounded by knickknacks of struggle;
pelts, sculptures of Navajo’s and Pueblo’s faces, musing
in soft ancestral wood, their thirsty bodies straining in paintings
to impale a buffalo from raging horse-back. Windswept villages
in pastels starve on the walls. A gnarled cane rests its knob,
never used, a Christmas present I gave him the year he went
on the Hajj. He sits like a chieftain before a keyboard
with red Arabic letters & a monitor flashing footage
of an old Libyan colonel, his face a bloody mask. A mob
drags him by his hair through the dust. The colonel’s body bounces
around like a doll’s; you can’t tell if he’s still breathing.
My father seems to be holding his breath for further proof. My
mother sits by the open window in the living room, blue eyes breathing
reruns about a doddering Polish couple encased in amber
cities they don’t recognize anymore. Their hands shake in a shoe
of a house the color of baggy corduroy pants, a loose belt
of black trim holding up the windows’ employment. She can see
a younger house, a girl like her doing the Watusi with her dog
on a small front lawn, asphalt gleaming in the sun like Elvis’s wet side-
burns. She rocks in her chair to the show’s theme, played
on a jangly, old-time y upright piano. The couple
shares the piano bench, leaning into each others off-key
warbling, he in his stained work shirt & bemused stogie, she
with her excitable jowls & floral print dress. From my own room
I can hear the strains of Those Were the Days, its flea-market pining
draped over cries on Libyan streets, & it comes through
like a crackly transmission from within a bombed-out
Rockwell painting. In my room, all the rock-star posters
are gone, walls are scrubbed tan, bookshelves sag, tired from school.
A heap of musty dresses & stockings convalesce on my bed,
as if a host of grandmothers blew through town
in a grand striptease parade. They left behind a mannequin, part
of its head bashed in, and some hair-gel. And I seem to know
what I’m doing with these fossils, even if I am not Elvis
in the mirror gyrating in stockings, crooning of the past. Even if
I am not the one beating the dead colonel’s head with a worn slipper.