I slowed for the
Christian icons/
the saints that
lorded themselves
before me/
Rembrandt/
Van Dyck/
mischievous Dutch
masters painting
bare forearms
and other pro-
miscuous sites
meant to amuse
(arouse?) me/
Gainsborough
taking captive
English gentry/
forever staring
from their gilded
framed cells/ tells
of their place/
sharing like fates/
to remind me
(& my kind)
of mine
Where the stone rose lolls down Maxwell, gathering
Woe to the beautiful, charming
young hunter doomed
to pine after his own reflection,
beat his breast and drown
over the love he’ll never ensnare.
Better to be the slow bulb
pushing blind through the dirt,
stark green and yellow sprout
surprised, one day, to find herself
blooming wildly where he fell.
talk to me how
Uncle Grady was a was a wannabe badass
but Aunt Velma jinxed his dreams
with scriptures out loud at every sit-down
meal. To escape he’d take weekend
fishing jaunts to Eva Harbor, steer
his Bubble Top Eliminator
on the Tennessee River where
he’d rant, Let’s cook the shit out
of this ugly bottom feeder. On weekends
he bolted himself in the outbuilding
& built fishing lures with paper
clips, a chunk of deer antler or empty
rifle casing. I found a tattered
Playboy & a charcoal nude
under a stack of towels in the half
bath, a spot Velma never cleaned. VietNam
sucked him up. I knew about the pint
of Absolut stuffed in his tackle box. Once,
when Velma drove to her cousin’s in Tupelo
he liquored up. That night he dropped
to his knees bellowing, Not one damn thing
can bring those burning bodies back. Sometimes
he’d look through me like I wasn’t there.
My stickiest memories of Dad
are of him drunk or sleeping one off,
reclined, feet up on the Lay-Z-Boy,
snoring to peel the wallpaper,
Mom knitting Christmas stockings in the sun room,
and me turning the volume up
so I could hear surrogate Cronkite
give us the black and white —
sometimes a great nation,
sometimes all you can do is shake your head
and wonder —
so that now, all these years later,
when my daughter asks
what her grandfather was like,
I fall back on my training
not to sugarcoat or cherry pick,
but factually relay:
people will disappoint,
you can love them anyway.
Memories
Silhouettes of the past
Endlessly shifting. Endlessly changing.
Here a wish. There a
Dream
Opening across the sky
Soaring on borrowed wings
Closing in on itself hiding
Memories
Patterns of what was
Transformed in the blink of an eye
Becoming the outline of a
Life
