Most Days, and: Test, and: What My Grandfather Heard

Most Days

Most days even the locals can’t find Denali on the horizon,

    shrouded as it is by a layer of fog, a hazy white        (like the tissue-paper protector atop his diploma,        granted after the fact, like a death certificate).

Most days no one sights the mountain

    wearing a curtain of clouds        (like a veil for a bride he left us to elope with).

The mountain is almost always

    swaddled day after day in clouds        (like an infant cocooned in flannel—        my uncle’s firstborn, brought forth in sorrow).

Most days even the locals can’t find Denali on the horizon,

    can’t find the place where his body can’t be found.

Most days I don’t think of Denali at all,

    don’t remember him, twenty-two years old forever        (younger than I am now, a skinny hitchhiker        with a handmade sign: going to see new niece).

That new niece was my sister, not me.

    I’m the one wondering, Tissue paper?    What kind of protection is that?        (Most days I don’t think of him at all: it’s that kind.)

Test

Mrs. Yeager’s handout of college prep vocab wordswas meant as an onerous task for a neophyte, a germane lexicon,but I ascertained first what had been my uncle’s initials: SAT.I heard no more of the lecture, repeated silently his moniker.Was this a.) auspicious, b.) ominous, c.) merely benign?

My mother’s only story: how my uncle, between all-night shifts at the post office and arduous college courses,used to rouse and feed an infant me, his hand to my mouth.Otherwise she kept a silence in which I learned ambiguous,lugubrious, and truncate. Through my uncle’s absenceI memorized doleful, evanescent, and curtailed by heart.

“Choose the best answer from the following:”—the sentence suggeststhere is a best answer for an empty mouth. Mortality isa.) conditional, b.) congenital, c.) incompatible, d.) superfluous.Death is a.) insatiable, b.) inexorable, c.) ineffable, d.) immutable.I am a.) the niece of no body, b.) death’s little dilettante,c.) consanguine with hoarfrost, d.) kin to white noise.

What My Grandfather Heard

My grandfather heardfrom his married daughter,who’d heard from an old family friend,who’d heard on the radio thathis own only son was counted amongthe missing on Denali.It was the first intimation of trouble.

Except that,except that a few nights beforemy grandfather wokein the Chicago darkto the voice of his soncalling, Father, Father, help.His son was, he knew, in Alaska,yet he heard his voice as clearlyas fear. My grandfather wokehis wife to say, “Our boy, he is in trouble.”

Born in the first generationto believe in angelsand airplanes equally,my grandfather knew breathcold enough to waft white in aircould also cast a shadow—for instance, as in Alaska.What he didn’t expectwas the absence of breathto stain the days with umbra.

My grandfather would go onto lose also his hearing, as if his ears couldn’t bearone more futile request.Instead, they subtracted the soundsof the world one by one,and let rise, instead,a susurrus in his mind,echoes of an arctic windblowing always in him.