Saints of the Household: Parts X–XV

Sometimes her suggestions bother me.
Grandpa does not attempt to provide inspiration.

I have her stop and take a picture
with my phone,
in the limey fluorescent light,
and I already plan in my head
how to paint her the
next morning before class.

Mom has picked up after-school tutoring
and restarted her consulting from home.

I paint lines open and expansive
while I think about Jay and me
as kids. How easy it was to run around
the spread of the earth.

It is sealed in her file,
and I had negotiated to let her send it at
the end of the year.

The buildings of the city are lit,
each a small light, the heat of a moment,
a second abode of humanity
and action.

Let it
heal me,
me—this worthy
tough worship of
image bearing.

Max prepares a makeshift studio in the garage so he can keep painting through the summer.

I hear Max before I see him. A stifled sob, heavy breathing.

They forget the earth we need so badly is almost every shade of brown. And blackness is the entirety of the color spectrum, a raven to the sun.

When I look in the bag that she brought, I see an assortment of T-shirts and a charcoal flannel that Max must have lent to her.

I take it up to our room and put it next to the foot of his bed so that he doesn’t think I’m flaunting it.

Mom makes so many kinds of veggie stews and quiches to freeze, and my body feels better than it had with the frozen pizzas I’d eat every day when I couldn’t get myself to school.

It’s not your fault that you’ve been hurt. I don’t know much, but what I have heard makes me think you’ve probably endured unimaginable pain, and you’ve been so strong.

Blue Joy Somber Jay
Liquid Red Heat Melody

I have so many angry
paintings, my recollection
of each bruise on my body, on
my own mother’s, on my brother’s x2014

Grandpa invites me to come up with him to his cabin and help him move back in, un-winter his home. I never want him to leave. He seems to know it’s his time, though, and I will never decline the chance to go to Grandpa’s house.

I’m a few minutes ahead of the sunrise, and I feel like God wants me to be there for this day’s genesis.

But I don’t think I could ask him about it. He shuts me down unless he wants to talk. And it’s a touchy subject because he was keeping it a secret from me.

But the flash aside, I see all their successful alumni on the front page doing work in NYC, California, and some Native kids doing some really good work. Winning something called the Jerome Fellowship, having big art shows out in NYC.

When everyone leaves and Max is in bed, I take out a topography map of Minnesota.

Tall and brown—two huge birds stand out so clearly in the grass fields. A pair. I gently close the truck door, and I can hear their thick cluck warble.

I think they make their echoing noises to look big, but watching them step together makes me smile. I look back at Max behind me, and I realize that right in this field, Max and I, too, are synchronized. The same, same as the birds.

The song sticks in my head, and I wonder what Dad I’ll meet here. I try to, instead, dwell on the steady oak and spruce passing by.

I used to think of the blue jay as such a villain, but this season, I understand that the sparrow, the crows, and even the blue jays, do what they do to survive. There are no perfectly benevolent birds.

And for the first time in a while, I am a little thrilled for myself as I think about Costa Rica. About our territory, the museums, the ocean, it being no longer solely in me, but me in it all.

She has begun to wash her face every morning, oil it with coconut oil, even cook without being as frugal as possible.

Other days, I listen to the entire Bible on tape, The Iliad, and I think of epithets for my family. For Max and me, and I think of us as we were, Max and Jay, the saints of the household. Now, I’d be Jay, the data-entry man. Mom, the chocolate woman. Max, the artist. Dad, the we’ll-see man. Grandpa, hermit of the Minnesotan woods.

He stops at a door, fumbles with a key from his pocket, and opens it to a dark room.

It’s the field.
Dark green, emerald edges, and each groove, each smudge above—a mustard field yellow.