Poem FOUR FAMILY by Doren Robbins

 FOUR FAMILY

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We didn't know anything—we were four people

living in a one-bedroom four-plex and they couldn't pay

 

the Seaboard Finance Company again. We didn't know

what was what. My oldest aunt,

 

the communist with a purple-silver perm, showed us

a woodblock print and a drawing of Käthe Kollwitz's mothers

 

and children—the wall the mothers made around their bodies—

we didn't really get it. My own mother's expressions bewildered me.

 

I remember my father washing the dishes and my mother sitting

at the cutting board drying them, crying and talking about Seaboard,

 

"Ralph, how the hell are we going to pay Seaboard next month?"

The dishtowel in front of her eyes bunched into fetal curves.

 

Packets of art reproductions came in the mail. Where did they get money

for that? She kept them in a drawer in the kitchen for my brother: Gaugin,

 

Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Toulouse-Lautrec. Rembrandt

drowned my eyes with that portrait of himself, of the bottom of his eyes,

 

at the end. My brother tried to copy it, he was always drawing.

Ma said she could just give him her eyebrow pencil wherever she took

 

him and he would sit there on the floor and draw people's faces

and women's legs. My brother knew more. When she broke down

 

he took me out of the kitchen, he covered me, I always had reason

to trust him. He saw more misery than I did. My mother and her

 

three brothers raised him during the war and for a few years after.

The faces in the Kollwitz drawing and wood block print scared me—

 

where were the fathers? Familiar mother's big hands

leather covering children.

 

It was the early fiifties. The dieseled ashes of Germany and more than

Germany were still a fresh part of the soot in the eucalyptus in our yard.

 

She feared that the eucalyptus would fall on our bedroom and kill us in our

sleep. She had it cut down. We didn’t say a thing. We were four people

 

living in a one-bedroom fourplex. Years after that—at the old La Brea

Theater—the four of us audibly cried out of our eucalyptus mouths.

 

We were watching the film The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. We didn't know

the book. I read it all in two days when I got it. Kollwitz's mothers showed

 

on the ash mouths and eyelids of those two mute guys in the book, they

struggled to watch over each other.

 

I follow it that way in my mind. I can't separately reason that I'm here

feeling this and not back in the Longwood Avenue kitchen

 

or in the La Brea movie theater lobby with what I felt.

Experience has not nearly increased accuracy enough.

 

Working with my father in the garage I used to make

boats out of scrap wood and metal. My connection

 

to assembling things, my connection to accuracy

began there. But I didn't know anything. Some nails

 

and the hammer, some glue, some blowtorch

did it. We owe a lot to the materials. Every tool lives

 

in a shrine, every shrine stands in for

the other—it all gets mixed up: the mute lovers

 

with the ones at the sink, brothers reborn in a mother's towel

with the fragile wall of mothers, with the reborn

 

eucalyptus, with the ash mouths and eyelids,

with the sheet metal sail.