If These Are My Fingers

If These Are My Fingers
Before my father returned from the Azores at the end of the Second World War, his father purchased eighty acres of farmland just outside Dinuba, about two miles northeast of their forty-acre home place. There was a dilapidated house and barn on the south side of the property. A quarter of a mile away on the north side, there was a tired Alicante vineyard someone had planted around the turn of the century. No attempt had been made to level the ground. Johnson grass grew everywhere in great mounds. My grandfather knew the property, having driven by it countless times over the years, penniless and proud. The weeds bore testimony to the soil�s vigor. After the papers were signed, the first thing my grandfather must have done was to turn over a shovelful of the heavy brown earth, pick some of it up with his hands, hold it under his nose, and inhale. And in that deep breath, he must have thought of his three sons, one of them dead in the war, the other two soon to arrive home. I can only imagine that moment � and imagining weep, and in my nostrils the spirit of earth remember, clay to clay, dust to dust, sun-upon-arms, defined by loneliness angry and proud � and then another shovelful, and another and another, until in madness all his sorrow lay buried, only to rise up again in the form of miraculous change, watched over by brooding mountains themselves the offspring of colossal upheaval. Only after this ceremony could my grandfather have begun his work of taming the land. Then my father joined him. What was his first moment there like? He never said. Like a fool, I never thought to ask. In 1946, my father and grandfather planted grapes � varieties for raisins, table, and wine. After several months of painful silence, my surviving uncle left the farm and returned to his job as a violinist with the symphony in San Francisco, which he had begun before the war at the age of eighteen. For him, silence and the bloody images of war slowly gave way to music. Back in San Francisco, when he first put bow to strings, I imagine his troubled spirit whispered to his bones, If these are my fingers and these are my ears, then I must really be at home. Home. I�ve been there once or twice myself and never left, and yet while I was there I was always gone. I�m there again now in the vessel of this quickly evaporating hour, pushing my shovel deep into the soil. *October 13, 2005* Previous Entry Next Entry Return to Songs and Letters About the Author	Many of the poems on this site are available in print editions. Main Page Author�s Note Background Notebook A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Let�s Eat Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation E-mail & Parting Thoughts Flippantly Answered Questions
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