Checking In
There you are Dad
on our cobbled deck
splayed out in my favorite chair,
our nearly feral cat
content to be on your lap.
You hold up the perfect tomato
so round and red-ripe—
I can almost smell it.
It’s the best photo I’ve ever taken.
How is it
no one smiles like that anymore?
That miraculous summer
of just enough rain
and just enough sun,
you and Mom would often visit
our small college town
set down among ridges
rolled up so regularly
they seem like ocean waves.
Mom would pitch in,
while you stationed yourself
on the deck,
and scanned the natural world
like a ship’s lookout
in an iceberged sea.
We all waited on you, Pop—
our pleasure to watch
your many cares
melt away
in the swollen sun of summer.
By now,
the town has grown
to a minor metropolis.
We don’t grow our own
tomatoes anymore—
content to shop
at the farmers markets
that dot the countryside.
Today, at first snow,
the site of our old tomato patch
is white as time-honed bones
but if I close my eyes
I can still see it,
vibrant in that luscious red
that was our
glorious season.
Second Nature
You would have loved
to have me in your class.
I was born with the soul
of a mule—plodding through
with heavenly persistence.
I’d march around my room,
high above a smoldering Brooklyn,
recite irregular verbs in Spanish,
and practice trilling my r’s
to the uncaring mirror above the dresser.
I took to math and history,
could diagram Faulkner’
prose, but never got far
with foreign languages.
I slowly learned
what it means to be born to.
I am an aged city kid
still most comfortable
with the lilt of moonlight
on a wet sidewalk
in East New York.
With the basement
steps to the Blue Note
and the way
my pulse takes
to the time of the subway
shuddering as it clings to the rails.
Forty years gone and I can still
advise you where not to be when
and get around Manhattan,
blindfolded and hobbled.
I love my little town—
dammit I grow things now,
but I will never be at home
in the surrounding woods, bedeviled
by beasts, real and imagined,
that range in size from ticks
to bears. When I first moved
here a friend who came to visit,
sampled the food and nightlife,
looked at me
sorrowfully and wondered
out loud how I dealt
with a place that was
so green.
All you need know
My grandfather, the lumberjack,
was often mistaken for Paul Bunyan.
When he yelled “timber”
it could be heard
from Seattle to Vancouver.
Once he felled an ancient oak
to teach me the lore of tree rings—
wide for a good year,
narrow for a bad.
His calloused hands caressed
the log as he said,
“this is all you need know of life.”
Grandpa, the watchmaker,
was stooped and gray, but elegant
as if he’d stepped out of a portrait
from a forgotten time of formal grace.
What Rodin would have given
to marble the bones of his hands.
I would sit on his workbench
in a shop full of child-sized tools
and watch him work and rework
the movements of a timepiece.
With a thousand pieces splayed before him
he’d say,
“Here I create time,
and time is all you need know of life.”
My grandfather, the farmer,
had the finest two hundred acres
in northeastern Kansas.
A doughty man born without ear or rhythm
he’d sing the standards—
“Ain’t Misbehavin” or “Makin Whoopee!”
as his steam tractor wobbled through
the flat fertile fields.
We’d all smile to imagine him singing
his heart out.
Once, I watched
him put his arm into soil elbow deep
and come away with loam black as pitch
and teeming with worms.
“All of life is here,”
he said to me.
Grandfather, the soldier,
had a grand mustache
that made him look like Pancho Villa.
He fought with Black Jack Pershing
in the Belleau woods
where corpses outnumbered
the bullet scarred oaks.
He would don his uniform
and his tin cap
to shoot targets with his long gun
at a quarter mile range.
I never saw him miss.
Fingering a spent cartridge, he said
with a tired smile,
“this is death—
all who live must meet it.”
My grandfather died when I was five.
I have few memories.
In one I sit on his lap
and stare out the kitchen window
at the unsuspecting walkers
on Riverdale Avenue.
We sit in silence—
his face is so yellow and worn
it seemed carved of candle wax.
At the last, I remember
I waved goodbye to his hospital window
impossibly high in the massive brick
then walked away with my mother.
Swaying and sobbing,
she held my mittened hand too firmly—
as if all life depended on it.