Two Poems by Gary Fincke

Blueprints

Yesterday, my sister begged me to box
and keep thousands of photographs
and souvenirs she had hauled home
from our father’s house after he died.
It’s been fourteen years, time enough
that her husband has also succumbed,
prompting her to gather and stack
a half-room of dried memorabilia
as if preparing to set fire to the past.

She hovers, leans closer when I pause.
Our father is in very few photographs,
our mother barely there. None are from
the century in which we are living.
What you don’t take, gets pitched,
my sister says, and despite dust
and asthma, I keep looking. Which
of these would be irreplaceable? Which
would I risk myself to save from fire?

A neighbor, after her house was leveled
by fire, had it rebuilt exactly as it was before,
cloned from photographs and blueprints
that survived in a fireproof, padlocked box.
This afternoon, her house has been filled
with furniture matched by memory.
Her elderly mother, that neighbor says,
is comforted by the television,

its familiar faces and voices
visiting each day at the same time.
When alone, I rummage through family
photographs as if they were exotic
playing cards to be used for solitaire,
arranging until every person ages
from bottom to top, a fortunate stack
of spades or clubs, diamonds, hearts.

*

The Job Icons

On their first birthdays, babies of the Thais of Vietnam choose their vocations
by grasping, from among many choices, a symbol of that work.

All those objects look like toys—a push broom,
A plow, stacked books and an intricate wrench.
These parents, right now, recall boys who picked
Product samples, insurance policies,
A miniature, unreadable lease.
They worry about the icon artist,
What intentions he might have captured while
Shaping for eyes so close to the carpet.
He’s formed blackboards and pulpits, small scalpels
With edges rounded for safety, but there,
Beside them, are the beautiful logos
Of the service industry, a soldier,
The telephone for a million cold calls.

After all that wishing, there’s no telling
What a baby, unguided, will crawl to.
For example, all three of my children
Plunged both hands into their first birthday cakes,
But only two of them smeared their faces
And flung their filthy hands into their hair.
The youngest threw his high and cried, afraid
Of crumbs or terrified at the swift change
In his fingers, how something like disease
Was sticking to him. Chocolate, we said,
Sugar, delicious, making the gestures
Of licking and sucking, babies ourselves,
Although nothing we did could quiet him
As he held them up like a prisoner.

*

Gary Fincke’s poetry collections have been published by Ohio State, Michigan State, Arkansas, Jacar, and Serving House. His next collection For Now, We Have Been Spared will be published by Slant Books late this year.