The Fire Landscape: Poems

The 1918 House

The 1918 House My father, whose limp is a stutter, Says he was born in the epidemic, The early days, when people survived As expected because it was just flu. In May, he tells me, the cases were Three-day fevers. By June, he says, the flu Had moved to where it always summers, Far from the warm weather of families. My father, who shuffles like those who Are stared at by children, accepts my hand For surfaces other than sidewalks To examine every place where he’s lived. In September, he tells me, symptoms Meant death—the coughing of blood, the blue face, The darkening of feet that said soon In the common language for conclusion. The lungs, he says, went soggy with blood; The people drowned for days. The newly born, He murmurs, were passed over like sons Of Jews, God’s mercy on their infant breath. My father, who refuses a cane, Touches a wall he built in a yard owned By strangers, pausing on his way to The beginning, the house where, in the year 101 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 101 Of the Spanish flu, he was first-born And no one died, where his parents survived To see themselves chosen, praising God And good fortune and their lifetimes of work. On both sides, he says, are the houses Of victims, sons who enlisted for war, And he pauses, the porch so different I have to read the number to prove it. How winter blessed us, he says, ending That horror, driving us inside to love. He asks me to knock on the white door; He says these people will invite us in. p102 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 102 ...