Rites

In the film I watch again and again, the ferryman rocks his oar
in its rawhide socket, feathering the river’s current
with something almost memory,

even though beyond the meander
the new century winches iron trusses from bank to bank.
There is a breeze across the bow he steers into. There is a ghost

he sometimes speaks to, and minnows that whirl
in the shallows like a doppler storm.
If this is more than work,

it might be ritual. Not freedom,
but its momentary feeling. Not how, in post,
the filmmaker imposed the keening of crickets

over a slow pan along the pines, each canopy a mask
damasked with shadow. We can’t see what lies
behind the trees, can’t smell

the acrid incense smoldering in a dish
lit by the long-dead with my mother’s maiden name
as they huddle back-to-back in the damp steerage of a steamer,

sheets hung up for walls. This is true, but I’ve lied to you.
I’ve only seen the logs, the onionskin manifests,
their signatures scrawled phonetically

on the glowing porthole of a screen.
I’m playing documentary and director. I’ve revised this
again and again—to what gain? Every day my mother carves away

at her retirement with a machine called a Cricut: it whirrs
as it perforates and embosses the cards
she stockpiles in Tupperwares

labeled Greetings. Birthdays.
Sympathy and Condolences. Downstairs,
my father files dadoes for boxes the size of a fist

that he stacks in a cabinet like ciphers for which his life is
the only key. Elsewhere, my grandmother hasn’t died,
forever clipping the tendrils of a juniper

in a shallow pot filled with river
sand and pumice. She rings branches with wire
then ribbons them in an imagined wind—the same that sways

the irises blooming from my great aunt’s brush,
inked century after century into patterns
of implication. Each stem:

a rivulet following horsehair’s
inherited gravity. Eventually, we become
our own inevitable symbols. Gradually, the morning dissolves

into a day like or unlike the one before. Across the river,
the steel lattice of a transmission tower
hoists its invisible current

above the fields
sown with clover and vetch
in a ritual of repair.