Poem
by Maryann Corbett • Photo by Jill Burhans
 You learn early about past. Eight hours away, a drive in summer— an obligation, like fish on Friday— north on the Jersey Turnpike, Tappan Zee Bridge, Merritt Parkway, with wind through the open windows making your hair crazy, and the smell of gasoline on the hot pavement of filling stations, and your father cursing the truck drivers. Past, in third-floor walk-ups with dark-stained oak and glass doorknobs and old people, whose rare speech crackles with foreignness, who are not the suburban present or the Sputnik future. Past, a simple question you ask: How old was my mother when she married and moved away? The glances, the evasions. Sometimes answers come almost to the lips of aunts whose husbands were tidily deceased years before you were born but your mother shushes them back to pounding meat for bracciola. More time, and you might learn, except that your father's vacation is short, as is his patience. Boca chiusa, the past. You will not find out who he is who drapes an arm around your mother in the cracked photograph at the back of the bottom desk drawer. |