In forty years, the babies I see in strollers
in Berlin will me my age, and I'll be eighty,
or dead. The memory of me in this city,
gone. New tragedies will abound, and some other damnfool
traveler like me will stroll under all these
grand monuments, feeling a little bit ennobled, longing
a bit for death. Thinking about God and signs
and non-existent things, he will gaze up at the
statues with a reverence. Regard
their frozen music; and remember those
brave old Teutonic lions: Beethoven, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche. The source of his pride and lack thereof.
Forty years or five minutes
from now hardly matters. Time collapses. My replacement
too will eventually be erased, and another generation
of mothers and babies will take
the streets. Death and its traveling
companion Life,
never knowing when to quit.
In trying to figure out the ghost I see in the mirror everyday,
I look to Angeline Simons, an Iroquois Indian who supposedly
haunts my family tree. I look to my Norwegian forebearers.
I look to Louis Ormson, a drunken cheesemaker & womanizer
who flipped his Model T into a river bottom and "fought
so savagely" with police when they told him his passenger
was killed, he was arrested for fighting (no such thing as DUI
in 1914, or sense, apparently). Or maybe it's my uncle Maurice,
a plumber from Waukeegan who hung himself with a piano
string. Or John Keegan, a happy-go-lucky Irishman, trampled
to death by runaway horses. In trying to figure out this strange
equation I keep running into, which I have to believe
is me, I think about my greatgrandpa Rudy Knapp. 300 lb. butcher
who fled Germany with his wife after "slipping on a banana
peal" (or some such), and impregnating the maid. I think
about my grandpa Powers, whose rule was he only drank
when he was with someone or alone. Or my grandpa Wheeler,
musician, father of three, married perhaps the most
beautiful woman in Wisconsin. Items found in his trailer post-
mortem: fertilizer, handguns, bagpipes, ivory canes with knives
that pop out of them, everything QVC ever sold (or couldn't
sell, let alone give away). Also, a sex tape for beginners.
He was 84. In trying to figure out myself, I look to myself, mostly,
and my parents, naturally. Two people who had no idea
what they were about when they went about the business
of creating me. I contemplate (carefully and considerably)
my mom,
lover of "languidg," ex-Spanish/English teacher who could spell
just about every word in the dictionary (I can't spell)
and never cared much for my writing. I think about my father.
I probably think about him the most, because he was
of such a different species than me. Perhaps the most even-
tempered person I've ever known, he didn't drink much,
wasn't interested in philosophy or poetry. He was interested
in politics, rum cake, chocolate, and the bottom-line: money,
gambling. And his favorite thing was gambling. We were the
same in that way. The way he'd walk into a casino was how
I'd walk into a poem, wholly grandiose. Full of hope, quite
certain earth was going to shake, walls would come down,
and salvation was only a little ways away. Of course, none
of that ever happened, or ever would, but we both at least
believed in it; a beautiful lark up in the clear sky. Just a little
flash of something imaginary, that never was going to die.
M.P. Powers lives in Berlin, Germany. His poems have been published in The New York Quarterly, Rosebud, Existere, Main Street Rag, Third Wednesday, A Cappella Zoo and many other fine places.