Family Stories (A Poem)

FIX YOUR LIFE

This poem was read today on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac , and although I'd like to dig up something for you that you're less likely to have recently encountered, I couldn't resist posting it. Its sense of family drama, of fury and love, of moments crushed and candles still burning...all seemed very real to me.  

And maybe that's the nature of families, more or less. The pain and passion in equal measure make us who we are.  The poem is called Family Stories, by Dorianne Laux.

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,

how an argument once ended when his father

seized a lit birthday cake in both hands

and hurled it out a second-story window. That,

I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger

sent out across the sill, landing like a gift

to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine

it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,

and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed

the people in his stories really loved one another,

even when they yelled and shoved their feet

through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle

of cheap champagne, christening the wall,

rungs exploding from their holes.

I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury

of the passionate. He said it was a curse

being born Italian and Catholic and when he

looked from that window what he saw was the moment

rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous

three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship

down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk

deep in the icing, a few still burning.