Loose Connections
I miss the cabin in Michigan
the family rented those two weeks
every summer going back
twenty or more years.
When the owner died
his children sold the place —
a kit house bought
from Sears-Roebuck
and delivered by railcar —
to a trader from Chicago
who plans on razing
the musty, spider-filled cabin
and erecting something more modern,
with phone chargers, one imagines,
in every room.
*
My mother can no longer speak,
dementia having robbed her
of even crude, guttural syllables.
She lies in her adjustable bed
lowered to six inches off the ground
should she roll out again
and kneads the hem
of the blanket
when my daughter and I come to visit.
I am always too uncomfortable
to spend more than a few minutes with her.
She reminds me of crisp, amber-colored cicada shells.
This woman once dove into a pool to save me.
*
Weeds have overtaken
the raised beds where I would grow tomatoes:
Big Boys, roma, the occasional heirloom.
I got tired of fighting the dogs
who scatter the dirt and overturn the wire cages.
The weeds aren’t all together ugly.
Some might even have been
medicinal in a previous life.
*
My uncle was a puppeteer,
free-drink famous at the corner bar
for his role as the gopher in the movie Caddyshack.
So many of his friends
died of AIDS, he suffered from
survivor’s guilt, relieved,
even grateful, toward the end,
when he learned the cancer
was terminal.
*
No one will remember all the gopher holes
I filled on the small farm we owned
those three years, or the compost bin I built,
storage for all the manure our two horses produced.
I sunk 6 by 6’s into the earth, took extra care
to make sure they were plumb,
then boarded three sides
with plank from the lumber mill
off the road to Taylorsville.
I lost my new prescription sunglasses
in the shit and the muck.
Sometimes when I’ve been drinking beer
I wonder if they’re still there.
*
An ancestor on my wife’s side was
forced to walk the plank
off the coast of New Orleans,
her ship boarded by pirates at night.
The family believes this story to be true,
but I argue it’s just as likely she ran off
with a cabin boy, or two,
maybe to Tahiti, some island paradise.
This tale would come up once a year
while playing putt-putt at Blackbeard’s Cove,
summers, in lake town Michigan,
where we used to rent a cabin.
14 thoughts on "Loose Connections"
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Perfect title for this piece—one memory leading sideways to another and another and another. They add up to a moving elegy, a river of loss. Bravo.
So touching, each connected to the next. I really enjoyed this poem.
Wow! I love this! Really, really excellent! Thank you, Bill!
I also like this line of poems, they are like cable cars of rolling down the track. .
Love the stories and how they fit together with the loose connections. Very nice!
Incredible !
Yeah , the connection timing flows so smooth and I particularly like the endash parenthetical.
Love the ending.
love the tameness of “playing putt-putt at Blackbeard’s Cove” juxtaposed with imagining “she ran off / with a cabin boy, or two”
I love your narrative verse
the way you weave seemingly
unrelated stories into
tapestry of emotion.
Masterful
Yes this poem was like a tapestry beautifully woven together
I really enjoyed this, a fullness of story. Using the cabin as a frame coheses these “looosed” connections in a powerful way.
She reminds me of crisp, amber-colored cicada shells.
This woman once dove into a pool to save me. -Oh my heart! This poem makes me think of laundry on a line, flapping in the breeze and telling family stories.
This is exactly the part that stopped my heart. Crisp got my attention… shell is so haunting… and it’s a sad and poignant study on what we become. Ah!
I also really like the form. Each memory as one stanza with lines of various lengths works well for this piece. Well done!
Now who’s channeling Jim Harrison! The details are rich and vivid (as usual) and resonating. This is some of your best work of the month, Buddy.
What a pleasurable circling around between the narrative poles of certainty and doubt. It’s interesting to me to see the ways in which some stories are true and some suspicious based upon our standing with them and their tellers.