`(from Things I Meant To Tell You)
In this picture, Arch, my gentle grandfather, grips
Eldon, his eldest, by the shoulders.
In a handful of years, these same hands
calloused and sun-hardened
will carve the child’s coffin.
Make it large enough to hold young Mildred.
See how the apple trees – the vanishing astrakhan –
hover around them, about to break open with
summer’s ample promise. Violet, my grandmother,
then so slender and young,
cradles her infant girl.
‘They ate unwashed apples,’ she will say years later
Long after her tears have all been spent. Such deep and
hidden grief. Perhaps this is why I never saw her cry.
Great-grandmother Ida, grafted strong from Plymouth
Plantation stock. She, too, will vanish. Her liver swollen.
Beside her, Bert, the silent son. Forty-four
years later, he lays dying on a pre-Christmas Eve.
Her laudanum bottle is found
at rest in the bottom of his
old pine chest.
Note the chicken coop and log shop. And behind them
a whisper of plank buildings that I can’t quite remember.
Barn and woodshed probably. And the seat,
it would seem, of the mowing machine.
Bitter red currants blossom here.
Young Florrie, just 14, in her apron, looks solemnly
into the camera, not dreaming that she too will name
a child Mildred, replacing the lost.
They are all recovering from the red measles
Elsie, the daughter yet unborn, will say. But today
the sun is hot. Feel its soft breath. See they are sitting
in the earth. Later, that same ground will whisper
cancer and cholera. Listen. Touch your ear
to the invisible grass and listen.
4 Se 2012
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