i never met my grandfather till today--
he dies in 1975
and today he was born
at the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen,
his coffin and crib:
he is swaddled in moth-eaten dishtowels
by a nameless undertaker
or perhaps the autophagic author himself
his crib and coffin:
he was buried a lifetime,
deaf to my own cacophonous et cetera
amidst cardboard boxes
he arises, stretches
and sits on our couch, transparent and whispering
his earliest recollections in ink from distant trenches:
he eats sliced-up milky way bars,
listens to little orphan annie and the manhattan rainstorms
as they flood his empty pillowcase;
my earliest recollection is a blank notebook,
never happened,
didn’t fall from the sky till three-quarters of a century later
in drops of impossible invisible ink
in 1934 i smell decades-old storms
and tobacco smoked by children;
today he tastes dough
from hands of women he could have loved
we break toys, apologize to our ghosts
listen to drops on macadam phantoms.
we think tonight was cloudy.
we left identical sleigh tracks in identical snow
laughed identical laughs whose echoes and imprints
are separated only by city and by many, many newspapers.
we remembered the same sun,
the same rain and lightning
and we both wrote that we may be heard
over the century’s thunder
but stopped, hid, tired, retired—
shaking hands
halfway to tomorrow,
never touching—
two strange strangers
left sleepless and motionless in the same notebooks,
the same house:
in the same cradles and the same coffins.
--written 1/3/20--
title stolen apologetically from the roky erickson song
inspired by finding my late grandfather's unpublished handwritten memoir at the bottom of a drawer of dishtowels
"Because I was a child and a man of my time--and because I nurtured the hope that the future will be better for my having walked this life… for this reason, alone, I write, that I may be heard."
