Of A Possible Past

i.
In those days I preferred my coffee
bitterly black in a moody diner
when the clock was near tomorrow,
but I’d rarely tilt a cup
without cream because it
stunted my personality
almost as much as the man in
the next booth
who’d fill two ashtrays of butts from
cheap, stale cigarettes,
the monotony broken by the occasional
Camel filter if he’d moved upscale in carcinogens
for the day.
That place was shelter for the bitching and angst,
with its harsh flourescents glaring over gritty floors,
patched booths and stools
where men with grease-slicked hair and dark tattoos
sat next to bearded factory workers
with belts overlapped by beer-guts
and were served thick waffles and cold orange juice by tired
care-worn waitresses who licked their fingers when they
cooked the meals.
The cramped bathroom where flies crawled across green squares
of wall tile in arid, oppressive heat
Seemed destined to hold the body
of some long-suffered soul curled around the toilet,
dead from choking whiskey vomit.

That’s the place I remember most vividly about that town.
… why, I can’t say.

I went back years ago, searching for pleasant nostalgia,
but found none.

Most of the city had long since gone to rubble,
ground beneath the heel of the dying
auto industry and the creeping
entropy that follows the lock-step march of Progress.

The home of my youth, miles away, was swallowed
by trees and greenery and dry rot,
and the graveyard grown thick with weeds
near the sagging church held the names of too many
I’d known who hadn’t the skill
or the courage to escape that place.

My brothers aren’t there,
though they, too, are in the grave:
One to stroke a decade past,
one to heart attack at 52,
and the last and youngest vanished without
so much as a boot print when 33.

ii.
I live alone now, in a modest house in the desert west
and sometimes, when my strength is up
and my hip loose,
I have my coffee under the moon and the crystalline net
of the stars, smoking the occasional clove cigarette for
remembrance’s sake.
We raised our children here,
my wife and I, away from the urban fear and strain,
struggling at times, to make our family work.
She smoothed the hackles of my frustration with her
unwavering belief in me while I wrote and wrote,
collecting a burgeoning stream of rejections
from publishers and editors,
my impatience made two-fold as I railed daily
against the blank-eyed ignorance of my students
at the university.

We met back in those bright lake days
and I think her a demi-saint to have withstood
my often angry and mutable mental state those many years.
I still have my first photograph of her,
given to me by her mother’s college classmate.
It’s a bit faded and frayed now,
sealed in its imitation gilt-edged album,
but she’s still there upon that mountain-top, sitting and
smiling, fresh and beautiful as ever.

Behind the hardness she used to shield from the hurt,
she had the kindest, gentlest heart of anyone I’d ever met.
She sang with a voice descended from angels,
and I tried, at times, to write her songs,
but I was never very smooth and adept at the rhyme.
Our times had their fissures, fractures, and strifes,
especially when debts grew like a cancer
and we were testy and sleepless from the kids’ sickness,
but we made it through
for when the lights were out,
we had each other to hold,
and that was all that mattered.
I spent the decades trying to love her like she deserved to
be, and in the end, I think I did a fair,
if flawed, job of it.

She was as she wanted, put to ash a quarter century ago
and sits upon the mantle
amongst the recordings of her song
and my books and verse, waiting, I suppose, for me.
There are pictures there that document the passing of
our years and what she saw as the
withering of her attractiveness,
but that was never what I saw, for the deepening of the lines
and the graying of hair were tinctures
in the growth of her beauty.

She was a rare flower to the day,
her hand in mine,
her eyes closed for the last
as mortality stole her from me.
I still miss her.

iii.
Sometimes I get visitors from the campus where I taught,
young eagle-eyed writers and poets
who want me to drop gems of word into their brain-pans
which, like pebbles in tin cups,
rattle with empty aspirations.
I think I’m often a disappointment since
I speak sparingly of such things anymore,
preferring instead, to ride out to those
rare places where the city hasn’t grasped
the stark primacy of nature with oily, metal fingers
and pressed the life from it.
Out there, watching the hares bound, and the wind breathe
gusts of dry dirt.
We’ll sometimes have a drink of whiskey
while I try to teach them to sing with their words,
but I think such tutelage to be,
though diverting, mostly a waste.
Such visits are rare, though, and grow less and less
frequent.

More often, my children’s children and their children
come to see this strange old man with his absurd tales
and the embarrassing habit of crawling
upon the carpet in front of his easy chair
with the great grandchildren.
I’ll often read them the stories I wrote when my kids
were short and uncertain with their wobbling gait.
They find the books,
with their accompanying paintings by my wife, sweet,
if a little sad in a quaint, antique way.

One though, my granddaughter’s daughter,
Who has my wife’s name and her clear blue eyes,
I can’t help but be partial to.
We’ll walk, sometimes, out past the porch
where she’ll gaze with joyous wonder at the hanging
pots’ blossoms, hiding
in goose-fleshed fear behind my knees
when the bees fly from the flowers to circle her hair.

“You’re a pretty booboo… Yes, you are…”

And later, after the sun has sunk to night,
and she’s tap-danced herself weary on the dark boards
of the kitchen floor,
I’ll carry her to bed and read her Charlotte’s Web,
making sure to show her all
the pictures of “piggies” within its pages.
And when sleep has overtaken her,
I’ll watch her in repose,
curled on her side, and kiss her forehead,
leaving her to her little girl dreams.

iv.
These and many more are the colors from which the canvas
of my years has been brushed,
some of the strokes uneven and smeared,
others bleached and vague,
but most good and true and bright.
Perhaps there is even a little good I’ve done
smoothed into the peripheries.
Whether others judge it as such is of little consequence,
for I am filled with few regrets,
my mistakes having taught wisdom, humility, love.

So tonight, I’ll sit on my hearth and play the strains
of “Carmina Burana” on the stereo,
remembering the love made to that music,
flip through an album of photo memories
to remind me of times young and full of passion, or
scribble a few lines of verse over a cooling cup of tea.

And later, when a lifetime of insomnia gives way to
weariness, I lay beneath the folds of blankets, wishing I
could still roll on my side to caress my
wife’s bare thighs. Sometimes, before my brain
surrenders to sleep, I’ll wonder on afterlife and what will
come when my heart ceases to beat and my life
dissipates like rising steam. But I rarely ponder long,
for I find my peace with closed eyes, knowing it matters
little, for we found our heaven here.

We got it right this time, my bella.
We really did…