June 19, 2019
Dear Grandmother,
Were you with me in the writing studio, surrounded by penciled facts and your son’s face; in the park with the low-rock memorial; in the walk through canyon trails and ghost reservoirs cooing with cattails; in the mountain baths with white bodies and wet wood? Were you with me in Arizona or the Eastern Sierras, when I stood beside your son, my father, and his wife, my mother: three in the cooler desert, correcting memory?
I can recall your dying and the days that followed—your body mourned and buried, then called back again in seven days, then 49, then 100, and one year on—the smoking ash in the iron bowl, incense seducing air. I remember running a stiff brush over your tender scalp, your mouth pulled in a closed pain, your death wish, uttered aloud from the hospice bed in my parent’s spring living room and me, little, hearing it.
Grandmother, I’ve grow close to these high desert blooms—the common yarrow and salvo, the rows of petunia; I feel the place unfolding in my blood like a new story. This evening, hail storms praised the Sangre de Cristo mountains, ridges alive in the pounding light. Empathy is a smooth stone that cuts sometimes, says my friend here. Freedom is pliers gripping a rotten tooth. Democracy is the blood of Christ turning into mountains.
A portal closes. My time in the desert is coming to an end.
There is no way to imagine your young life enduring the camps, except in dream-poems, except through archive-shadow, except in the cards upturned on the mystic’s table in the middle of the wretched summer basin, shot through with mesquite and buried laughter.
Grandmother Alma Teranishi Saito, you are missing.
I am missing you.
love,
Brynn