The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon

On Independence Day 1918
my granddaddy proved
it doesn't take a world war
to stop a man's life.
An action in his blood
proved fatal to his heart
dropping him
from the rocker to the floor
ravaged as any dead soldier.

Silence greets his five-year-old daughter
my mother
who pulls at his shirtsleeve
and searches his unseeing eyes.

Was it mere coincidence
that her other man
my daddy
sixty-two years later
would make his exit on the same holiday?
Or was there in her blood
some affinity for men
who made independence day
a mockery of what we think we know?

Mama warned you, Daddy.
If she told you once
she told you a hundred times
to get the reverse gear fixed
on that old stationwagon
and to empty the trunk
of beer bottles that
rolled around for two years
after you retrieved your last one
cold from the creek
and drank it down.

Even she, who expected every day
to hear how right she was,
didn't expect this,
on the Fourth of July
down by the cave
where you loaded up your son
the Scoutmaster
and boys who clung to the old car
like young possums on their mammy's back.

All you had to do was cross the road
and ease along the woods trail
toward recreation at the pond.

But when the engine died, and through the dusk
you saw the other car
with the other driver coming
hellbent to meet you
and you knew that reverse wouldn't do,

I wonder

what you felt
if you had time to feel
in that moment before impact
broke the bones of boys
punctured my brother's lungs
and drove the steering wheel shaft
through your throat.

It was not a dignified death.

In the middle of the night
I drive sixty miles to view the corpse.
It is not you, proof that
the body is a means, not an end
to the soul.

I seek you at the place
that was your home
the week before
when you wandered with me
across the pasture full
of patient cows
watching the two of us
fill a tin pail
with blackberries.

You said, "Be careful where you put your hands.
There may be snakes in these bushes."
I nodded.
A small tenderness between us.
Death seemed distant then.

You used to say,
"I'm not going till the Old Master is ready for me."

I stand in your kitchen
drinking from a pot of brew
more chicory than coffee bean
and harsh, like unwept grief.

Mama has spoken the truth
to Aunt Lily Mae for whom
the beer bottles babble
that you had not changed.
She does not know,
can't fathom
your feral longing for a larger life.

What I know of poetry
I learned from you,
from your love of nature's display
and most of all
from your refusal to be tamed.

My keening comes
while I am running
through piney woods
through rattlesnake-sheltering
berry vines
to the summit of the hill
crying out Father!
a name I never called you
but now it soars
in lengthening cadence
an epithet formal and distant
as if you were not daddy but God,
the Old Master Himself,
whose readiness fell
untimely on your head.

My anguish is not brief.

Years later
I dream I see you standing
on a hillside in twilight
holding your hat in your hand
studying the animals
who have gathered
silent and still
wondering with you, perhaps,
if your life answers
what it means to be human.

Today I can praise your presence:
your flesh is the soil under me now,
your bones stone.
The creek runs with your bright blood.
Your hair is grass.
The sun shapes your eyes.
Clouds move like thoughts
driven by the wind,
your breath, Old Adam.