The Poet Corrects the Official Documents
I returned to visit the mid-level clerk so many times,
that finally, it seems, she Googled me.
She said, "I read some of your stuff and you're not big
on metaphors, are you?"—she thought
there were always supposed to be metaphors—
No, I said. "But you could try metaphors," she said.
The first time I visited City Hall about
an error on a birth certificate from
another country—and also, an error on a
marriage certificate from this country, which
was leading to legal trouble for my son
in a third country, and my search for
resolution led to many visits to City Hall
—that first time, I naively thought
it was going to be simple as a sun rising,
simple like an asteroid crashing, simple like
my last day on this sorry planet, when the
asteroid would hit and no sunrise for me,
but the document had to be translated
so, I searched for parking downtown,
circling round and round, which could feel
like a spin cycle around one of Dante's circles
of hell but eventually I managed to parallel park,
like a pea in a pod, I arrived at the building entrance,
tried to locate the door, hidden like the passage to a
pyramid chamber, and then took the
elevator to the 20th floor where a tightly
dressed woman like a fashionable riddle
wrapped in an angora mystery, inside an
enigmatic office retrieved the translation
I'd ordered via an App, and the more I asked—
did it have proper notary signatures and such?—
she kept stamping it with more seals, red
and gold seals like 14th century death
orders from cardinals and unsmilingly
stuffing the translation and the birth certificate
facsimile into official-looking envelopes.
I drove back to City Hall and searched for the
mid-level clerk who was at lunch, who after an
hour's wait said, "what about similes?" and I said,
a poem's OK without them, but the translation
was Not Acceptable, it was not notarized and what
were all these odd stamps and seals? All silver
and red and gold and 14th century-looking?
They were silly—but she'd read my poem
about the Afghan girl in the '70s, she said, and
I answered—like a lost balloon losing air—hmmmmmm,
someone else must have written that, "no, you did,"
she said, "you need another one," she pushed
the documents back through the little slot under
a grill acting as an evil time-travel portal holding back
my son's legitimacy in this dimension, but look, I said,
OK, I do remember writing that poem after all,
and, sure, the poem lacks metaphors but
they were not needed with that subject matter,
and the bureaucrat said, "but you do need a notary
and a local translator—there is one we use but
you'll have to drive to Somerville," and I was engulfed
in despair like rising water, like freak storms, like a wild
fire of realization that I was not going to get the
document for my son that day or even in this decade if
I didn't have the birth certificate corrected,
if I didn't have the translation and the notarization
and then the official said, "don't forget the Apostille"
like an afterthought and I have never figured out
exactly what the word "Apostille" means—it has nothing
to do with those guys and Jesus—but I had to locate
another building, another bank of elevators, a strange hallway
and offices, and people pointing me down hallways to other offices,
where there were long lines, and signs saying "citizens"
and "non-citizens" and behind the clouded glass, clerks
like blurred photographs photocopying and sorting
and stacking and stamping, and receiving the Apostille
took surprisingly not as long as my conversations with that
City Hall official who said, Meter? Stanzas? Sestinas?
The accent on the correct syllables?
You are stuck in another time, I wanted to insist,
You are focused on entirely the Wrong Things
—haven't you ever heard of free verse?
But if I said this she might spit, "freedom isn't free"
as government officials sometimes do,
and I needed—ultimately—the marriage certificate,
corrected, that only she could adjust,
and it would require a lawyer's affidavit
in another country, she also insisted, at some point
but first I had to get the birth certificate translated.
And don't forget there was the other birth certificate,
for the other relative named on the marriage license,
and back at city hall she said "we can't accept that,"
like clockwork, like a bell tolling, for whom, for me
and I said, but this birth certificate was issued
in this country! In this city in fact—from this office,
actually—and she said, "OK but we don't issue them
like that anymore" like an automaton, like the undead,
like she was eating my brain and I said,
but that's because my son wasn't born yesterday!
He was born thirty years ago! "Ah, well, you can pay
for an updated copy of the birth certificate," the official said.
And, reader, I did. I paid fifteen dollars.
It was still morning (though maybe a different morning?)
the light was brighter as if the planet's atmosphere itself
had changed and our future was not doom and
ice and heat and fire but rather the transformed dawn of a
purified future—sort of like hope—and I managed to
parallel park downtown and went to the international
shipping office where there was a sign on the window
that said • closed • help wanted • email if interested •
and what sort of way is that to run a business? Yes,
I know, supply chain problems, labor problems,
the great resignation (all a hoax of predatory capitalism)
but I was not resigned, I was determined, I would not be thwarted.
I drove to the next address my GPS located for an international
shipping service and soon found myself standing on
a loading dock, like an island, like a space station, surrounded by
vans with the right logo, so I knew this must be the place,
I saw the Atlantic Ocean and airstrips and knew there must be a way
to get the documents from this continent to that continent,
but where was the office door?
My descendants' future prosperity depended on these documents,
depended on me constantly finding parking and locating doors,
depended on these vans and planes, my son's future
in another country, for now, for posterity, for all time
just like all the documents stretching back in a great papery arc
across the histories of the despised classes of Europe:
my Sicilian grandfather, sixteen, alone on a
transatlantic crossing, my other ancestors, Irish:
boxing promoters and night club singers, produce dealers,
pop bottlers, shoe heel manufacturers, vaudevillians and
hoteliers and waiters and hoofers and caretakers
and homemakers and here I stood on the loading
dock, envelope in hand with my own child emigrated
and in need of this Apostille—whatever the hell it was—
that City Hall official's voice still ringing in my ears,
"Aren't you supposed to be the person who understands words?"
Standing on the windswept loading dock
like a gothic heroine on the moors
with my facsimiles and metaphors and similes, copies of receipts,
duplicates of the birth certificates for good measure, corrected
marriage certificate, apostilles, and translations,
I received a text message from my son:
there had been an error, made by a Brazilian bureaucrat,
their advocate spotted it in the fine print,
where the man had checked a box
that my son and his wife were married—
they were married! Without proving they were married.
Without presenting a single error-riddled document,
or a corrected document, or the ruling by the judge
stating that my son was in fact the same person named
on each erroneous document with a slightly different name,
the corrected documents, the updated birth certificate,
the Apostille, which we would never find out now exactly
what it was, because the stack of receipts for hundreds of dollars
in shipping and translating and the many meaningless stamps
and seals and the new and the old—were irrelevant.
It was only the Brazilian bureaucrat's error that mattered, that careless
checking of the box that no one followed up on, no one inquired,
"may I see your marriage certificate?" but, instead, led to many other stamps,
and officially, their marriage, which gave rise to their citizenship,
like a new birth, or resurrection, or transmogrification
my son's irrevocable and forever absence
guaranteed now, officially he was not coming back,
like my Sicilian grandfather, lost to the new world
in 1913, and my great-great grandmother Catherine
during the famine, emigrated from Tullamore in county Offaly,
a town known only for a whiskey distillery and history's
first aviation disaster—a hot air balloon crash!—and like
so many emigrants before him, my son was now, officially gone
and like a candle flickering, or a broken phone screen,
or Hollywood search lights scraping the sky, meaningless,
pathetic, miniscule against a dark night, that vast universe of stars,
that faint sweeping, like weeping, like extinct fireflies,
like lost comets streaking away: now the lights
are fading and I have nothing left to pursue. I stand alone
on a loading dock, like a metaphor for something,
my clenched fists raised to the sky, grasping receipts.
