That’s Who

I do not know you,

as if ever one could,

you in the bible cover

under onion skin,

but always they called you Little Chistine

the last and the tiniest

that hollow leaf on the dead branch

when they spoke reluctantly about family.

That’s you.

It’s a spot with no picture,

a sprout barely green,

on a twig that had stretched its limit

petering out into the fathoms of an alternatively browning spine.

The ink still looks fresh for you

as inks do when they beckon

dots pronouncing where a loving hand sometimes hesitated

in your namesake cursive

silently screaming in indigo how you must be found.

That’s you.

I bring myself to the old coal town,

my first time where we’d kindled as Americans,

a tiny town for a tiniest you

home to little else than three churches and seven sprawling cemeteries.

There are more people dead here than living here

many of them ancestors

and my notebook is out

my sad, erasable pencil scratching forth and back as I

one by one

spot every one

all save for one.

That’s you.

Two broiling days

measured in faded headstones

hot to the touch

and I thirstily begin again

square one, grave one

in the cheat of dusk with a flashlight

overnight without a wink

and a third beginning come breakfast-time

because I must have missed you,

Little Christine.

My scour now less a pattern than a frenzy

knowing you are here

in an old and hollow space

around this bend or that

for which I grow feverish

the burn in my chest, the flames in my calves,

a sun sooner to crisp than to light a way

no closer to being able to say it.

That’s you.

Cruelly our memories neglect

and so bitterly the records repeat

with cantankerous blanks from the paper bomb

as much use as ash

and my frustrated temperature rises.

But then a small, Russian cross

carved in Ukrainian Cyrillic

a headstone sidelong on the path

well mossed and moist and cool in the shade

its figures hidden but for a few shadows from bulbous, stony creases.

I clear it apace with my burning hands

my forehead ablaze without and within

a flash and a rush

but I cannot read it.

This alphabet and I are strangers

its figures all melty and queer

waves of embossed, watery characters in granite

trying in vain to wash away one too many somethings

and then longing to tell me the tale

when stones became inks

going deftly unheard as it bellows out the unspoken story of a child

taken in her crib

taken in fire.

That’s you.