Little Deprivation in the Big North Woods

                                    I thought I should tell my sister not to

go there again, never go there,

                                                  our grandfather dying

of some disease that makes him have heart attacks

in winter, the thick plastic sheeting over every

                                                                 window, such meager

light in those rooms and you can’t

                         see out, our uncle burning

through his liver and crashing everyone’s car, whole family

squatting in that slumped house full of

                                                   newspapers and ashtrays,

the ceiling tiles falling, porch steps sinking deeper

every year into the ground, and our brother glowing

with a terrible manic fever

                                    or sinking, too, or making

stilted amends or angry we weren’t there to nurse him

through the last fever.

                                  But I don’t say it—don’t go

                                               home,

                                                            and she goes,

makes that northward trudge, past all

Starbucks, all Targets, past interstate highways and also

                                                              the hope of ever

distinguishing herself from the soil from which she

                                                                             sprang

or crawled or never

            fully crawled, and this time Dad

                       tells her two things she calls to tell me.

                                                              One,

when they were preparing to eat the new potatoes and peas

that are maybe most of the reason

my sister visits at all—that tenderness, that mouthful

                                                                           of sweet green,

like going home but without the pain, or with a little less

pain—and she was looking for a spoon,

                                                    my father said, I’ll have to wash it.

            used the rest to cook his drugs.

                                                                  Two,

a boy of seven,

buttoned into his good shirt, pants ironed, our father let

the music spin him in the center of the school gym,

                                                               shedding

twelve toothaches and failed scout badges

                                                    and his father’s

unaccountable rage like spare change flung

from his pockets, and then he went home

                                                              good-tired

and still too buoyant to sleep, so he stood just inside

his bedroom door, listening to his parents

                                                     in the hallway ask his older

sister, How did he do at his first dance?

and she said, He looked like a loser, and that’s why,

               our father told my sister,

                                       he never danced again.

                                       And still I don’t say it—never

go home—because what about the front door

always unlocked, damp boxes

                                                     of rubber dolls and crayoned

drawings, a whole basement full of years

and years and days, same basement where the uncles

working on the cracked foundation found

                                                     a jar of  buried cash, hundreds

of disintegrating dollars some government agency had to

                                                              microscope together,

send us a check that kept us in

            fuel oil and hamburger meat for months.

                                                     And the photo albums

blooming mold there in the dark—me

bathing in the sink, my sister with her eye patch

in the arms of the mother who left

                                      those photographs behind.

What about the few blessed days after snowmelt

when lilac mixes with the scent of mud

                                       and you can only think

                                                                 new, new?

You can only believe we’ll be reborn together

                                                                 somewhere else,

somewhere easier to breathe but the air

                                                 still smells this

                                                                        sweet.

What about that money dust—our inheritance

                                      finally unearthed—and the way we

                                                                        dig in, the very ground

                                              beneath us a lottery we can’t not play?