Of mornings my grandfather attended German school
And the nuns’ black habits cloaked their black Prussian hearts.
If of a winter’s morning he were late for mass,
The nun forced him to kneel in the aisle  on the sharp steel mesh that caught the snow.

He worked at that German institution, Westinghouse,
Its endless caverns of dingy brick
Curving with the valley,
Curving with the tracks.
Grandfather was a machinist
He stood at his lathe in the center of the Machine Age
And lived on Electric Avenue.
He taught me die Pflicht,
Not joy but plight.

My father wrote off my three sisters,
After all Knox taught predestination,
But kept alive his hope for me.
He and his brother, both tall, handsome men
Distinguished with silver hair,
Rest a few yards apart in the Presbyterian cemetery,
In the shadow of their parents’ mausoleum.
And that brother, my uncle,
The lifelong bachelor,
In his spare flat,
A black desk with his shortwave receiver,
His captain’s chair
Forever wiping dust and soot from sill and radio knobs.
From his second-storey window
He was level with the mainline
And checked trains with his turnip watch
Extracted from his vest pocket,
The second hand sweeping over the box-car numerals.

I pulled in Sitka last night, he told me,
And we saw seaplanes bobbing at their docks,
The ropes creaking
And in the water broken yellow stripes reflecting fuel tanks,
The snowcapped mountains broke forth from the sea
Abrupt and steep, leaving hardly room for a shore,
And the light was grey-blue
Vibrating with gulls and eagles.
He worked near Grandfather, at Union Signal,
Frugal, on time and precise, amid locomotives and Morse code.

In the countryside, in the soft mountains green with forest
Lived the Quaker aunt and her daughters,
And the church was the meeting house,
The service no service,
Just profound silence in a room,
As plain as my uncle’s apartment,
And after an hour they rose, shook hands
And went their several ways,
Alone with God, alone and private.

At the Catholic church Irish sermons:
“A sinner’s flesh burns like a piece of meat
For all eternity”.
The stations of the cross,
One tableau of torture after another,
“Jesus falls for the third time”,
Then the wail of flectamus genua,
The atmosphere fumed with incense and dread.

But my friend told me about another world,
A church that stood on the marches between Greeks and Asia,
A church with Zweibeltürme instead of steeples,
Blood-red, golden and purple,
Like a czar’s outpost on the steppe.
He told me the choir and its master were invisible,
The music mixing with clouds of incense,
The priests in jeweled vestments chanting
In a frontier language,
The congregation standing,
People moving in and out,
For each soul was parched to a different degree,
Thus they drank longer or less to slake their spiritual thirst.
His father was the invisible choirmaster
And he floated into his son’s ears
He opened his son’s ears
To sleighs jingling over hard snow
And midnight suns on Baltic isles.