Invisible blood huffs through the veins of sky,
pulsing, vascular streets;
the town she lived in, she never liked.
A place for antiques, the past wears pilgrim hats.
The Cape Verdian-owned cranberry bogs
were bought up by developers.
The Cordage Company is now colleges
and a dialysis unit.
She sees this world as flat,
a river with a swollen mouth.
Like grandma,I walled my life up, the dam broke.
For me, this different world floods in.
Philanthropic drug dealers furnish the emphatic addicts
who propagate the Hippocratic hypocrites who
float business to the Funeral home
used-car sales men.
Not like when Grandma was young.
Chopping down white pines, mixing concrete;
rough nails rooted in earth.
Her world was a forest, where evening
darkened early but the chopping ensued as
the branches breathed like woodwinds.
For years in her bright red pocketbook
she kept an arrow head from her back yard.
Its mute edges and chiseled notches shimmer
with its last intrusion into the heart of game
that vanished with the elm trees.
We can never go back, but can’t forget.
We put her in the autumn ground so that
her roots could return chanting
a new primordial pine forest,
cathedral-like junipers. She knew the earth
and I remember the story she told to me,
about a voice she heard singing in Native tongue.
In her rural home, no one else heard it except her.
Up from impacted soil, the singing voice
enveloping her cellar. A fleshy moan unknotted from
what we now call “history” -
She knew that chant in her blood.
I know that chant in my blood. It is the mourning song.