In the yard of my mind the grass is always cut every Tuesday. The dirt, even when wet, doesn’t stick to the bottoms of my feet but lays like a chalk tapestry. Silky ribbons of hard lime trail from where the faucet drips down in a steady pace beating along with my heart giving little choice but to move along — each day a nervous tic on the face of a year. So far life has not disappointed me in terms of gifts and lemons; knowledge of how far I have come has not had the desired effect. Swan diving in the river of my ancestors’ blood disturbs treasures from the silt: a piece of tile made by my father’s grandfather hand-patterned and fired in a bellowed kiln laid with engineered care and hidden in plain view. Far back from the street history still paves these avenues with Jewish dreams. My Serbian genes fire up with the thundering notes a brass band lets out on summer streets thick with people flirting, smoking among them my father, too young to imagine how he would later do the same on New Mexican soil in a language that left his tongue perpetually tired. Nowhere felt like home’s backyard lined with pear trees and grapes hiding the tiles now caked with decades of forgotten dust. Knowing how it split his soul to leave was masked with excitement — that ache, already arthritic, took its place beside the shed that stored tools used for his mother’s tomatoes. Gifts of songs and sips of rakija still buttress his lifeline to a world as old as the largest empire since Rome. My mother’s grandmother, decked in furs from the woods where pagans kept fires burning for the god Perkunas found herself surrounded — an island of civility between Nazis and Soviets intent on taking the land for their own — fleeing after she buried the family silver and three bottles of turkey in brine. Three years in 'DP' camps made her steely life in New Jersey left her hopeless in seeing Kaunas streets again. Little wonder that my own mother would become her favorite by the time she died in Virginia for that steeliness would thicken the moment her granddaughter stepped out of a train onto Lithuanian territory heard the language which had her spending every Saturday in school taught by other immigrants preferring the company of those who knew what it was to be raised by people who dreamt of silver buried in Soviet grasses. Hallowed by my mother, kept alive through lived words there remained a piece of iron will hammered into the shape of a cross which led my grandmother through life’s disappointments kissed for every miracle retribution in exchange for land theft was sworn by that cross. Something about oaths, however, is that not all can be fulfilled. Neither my father nor mother can fire a kiln bottle turkey in brine or live for anything that is not here. Conception in pride alone is as good as they can earn in foreign currency — once you leave that land you’re never really welcomed back. But I will plow the fields of their memories tie in sheaves tall stalks of wheat which I’ll bake into bread to serve with salt and wine on the well-swept yard the house of our dreams to our backs flowers on every border hands deepened by loam and interwoven with steel not a single grudge remaining. Make these genes my guiding star when they, too, are gone. *** DP = displaced persons