does what he does
because he has no home.
Pix’s horse
has been left afield—though with
or without her new teeth (a nice set),
she’s always been real as the red
in a swirl of autumn leaves—
is there the moment she picks up the phone.
Her eyes wane: a mercy, perhaps,
given how much she’s seen of this world.
Even her aneurysms sing her praise.
There are many people like her,
of course—the undecorated, the constant,
amid what will defeat us all in the end.
She could be a Quarles emblem:
Patience, a little old woman, stooped
at a bend in the road, waiting
with a nice slice of pie.
Neither she nor her hubby have jobs,
often, but they do not change her.
More than anyone else,
she’s given our name a house to live in.
These days, she’s usually playing poker
when I arrive. You can watch her
on the internet. I sometimes think
it’s because we don’t have much to say,
but suspect, rather, that it’s
the adrenaline: little kings marching
out your door—always, in one way
or another. And who likes that?
It’s worse than an empty fridge, except
for baloney spread, because you can’t
get them back, or anything else really.
Grandma McElwee’s Irish house
felt like a 50s Catholic Church:
cool, dark, reverent—large painted statues,
wavering votive candles, a sliding
Confessional screen. And doilies!
They made her polished end tables, old lamps,
seem other—like something out of Joyce.
She loved us, in earnest, quietly,
like the swish of young cassocks in a nave.
Pillow mints in small bowls graced her table;
a fine, smooth ironed white cloth beneath.
Outside, a transistor radio pressed
to my ear on her front steps, I caught
Baltimore baseball: a game from another
city! It shocked me, the want in those
announcing voices, the crowd in the stands
as well; each needing Oriole success
as much as I needed that for my own team.
How many people there must be out there
in the world. What place could I have,
make for myself? Surely there were doctors
there, a ton of scientists. Even if I learned
enough, there was the question
of perseverance. At 7, what had I ever
seen through; what could I, always
so far from any goal, achieve?
It was like walking into a library
for the first time, seeing all those books.
I would never finish them.
As I went back inside, small boy, Grandma,
always, in memory, in a black dress: I asked
her to pray for me to the woman
framed in palms fronds, St. Therese.
I could see her fret. (She said she would.)
But the thing is, I don’t think
it’s different for anybody. We are all
ill-equipped, not ready for anything,
not ready to be heroes. We are still
on a porch or in a dark room, a quiet radio
or a family of voices pressed like mercy—
yes—into our ears.
My parents bought me
a tall cardboard store one Christmas,
empty labeled cans, boxes for the shelves.
It was generous; and though I liked feeling
that I might have a grocer’s place
in this world—I didn’t.
Did I want to sell my helpful sister
some beans? Why, yes I did!
But that was it: no conversation, no tension,
no narrative; just “You shop,” “I sell.”
Another possible direction—dashed!
A young Shelley
would have been good company
at that point: all the tides and empty seas
in the world—in a grey basement—
everything reduced to what was not there!
How quickly, I wonder, did that little shop
get
