Such Deaths

...E Commonweal 16 July 14, 2000...

...birch tree...

...coming back on the New York Thruway, we drove off at Utica Oars dipped, we headed up to the mouth of Sashabaw and went north to my father's Newport farm...

...The barn's Seeing it...

...From the cottage door, by a trick of perception, it apat a country store to get to the final turn...

...A few Distance away, far broken, moss-edged boards lay scattered where the barn As memory is from had been, as if these alone had been too miserable to steal...

...Newspapers, broken At times I have felt glass, and beer cans littered the basement and, in the darkThe world so utterly est corner, a patch of snow remained...

...Wind scurried over the farm, a hint of more snow to come...

...I wish I could have done as much...

...He knew the place, he peared perfectly round...

...mortuary lackeys were standing at parade rest, a strange Returning up the slope, I picked a solitary stone from priest my parents never knew was leading prayers for the the ground and weighed it in my hand...

...The Writing these words...

...He had heard his father speak of my father's family...

...I was only guessing: I could not name it...

...Tore down," he said...

...Gone...

...Someone needed a door, And self-pity constant a pair of hinges, a piece of siding, a window frame, a few Reminders of the I old barn boards, stones to erect a new foundation...

...The My parents are buried beside each other in Holy Sepulfarm had been sold at auction to an absentee landlord after chre Cemetery in Southfield, Michigan, below a slight rise my Uncle Will, who lived on the farm, died...

...But mostly stone foundation had been smashed, run into by someI am always the same one's jousting truck perhaps, and stones removed...

...Out of sight a bird called, an early arrival, perhaps a horned lark...

...The first time, regret Scavengers, the man had said...

...Since then, for in the ground and in the shadow of a double-trunked white all practical purposes, it had been deserted...

...But I did kneel there and I saw my parents made up the oars, which made only light sucking noises in the water, and dressed up, resting in their satin-lined caskets, clutching Dan and I squatted in opposite ends of the boat...

...How to explain eighty Robert Cording years...

...Only a cellar hole of chiseled and fitted stone Am to myself, Eckhart was evidence of any kind of dwelling when we parked the Said about God and yes, car and walked over the grounds...

...watch for low-flying herons along the shore, and someI took the family to my mother's funeral in Detroit, and where hear gentle mourning doves in the breaking dawn...

...I vowed eral minutes peering into the black water I saw none, nor not to kneel in that solemn parlor, where the dark-suited did anything move except the wind...

...I "Scavengers...

...The ground had been Absorbed there was no- dug up in places where rhubarb or roses or something Thing to see, no one thought to be of value had long ago been taken...

...Ice was still tight in spirals along the banks...

...I traveled down to a brook among dark maples, where and recognizing no one, her days completed...

...directions when I first had begun visiting from Massachu- Halfway down the hill to the lake, my father had plantsetts, but often I was flying and this was the first opportunity ed an elliptical bed of red and white petunias for my mothI really had to drive there, although I needed the aid of a clerk er...

...My mother would have known, had she been there...

...We would rosaries in their lifeless hands...

...Who...

...country was abandoned to teasel, juniper, and old-field cedar...

...We approached through exhausted, haphazard, weedCloser to me than I grown fields...

...of too-perfect blossoms, sidewise glancing to learn by whom Saturday mornings at Lake Oakland, before the sun was the garlands had been sent...

...House, barn, all tore down...

...I wiped my face with my hand, finding tears...

...I thought my father in his time up, with the sky streaked pink, we would be at the dock, would have preferred scarlet bee balm and black-eyed Su- untying the boat...

...He had given me Creek to fish...

...A place month...

...the early skunk cabbage leaves were just beginning to apIt was seven years between their deaths but it was like a pear...

...The farm is gone," the clerk said, "so you won't be surprised...

...I did not want to know that my parents were dead...

...Rowing out into the lake, my father at sans...

...then, reaching dead, and the closed-lipped mourners sat within the breath back, threw it as far as I could across the land...

...I walked through the fields where my father and his father together had walked...

...for cruising muskrats, I thought, but though I waited sevI did not and do not understand death that easily...