Grandma & Twigs
In Imitation of Robert Lowell
They inhabit Mnemosyne Township now,
these citizens who whitewashed and bolted shut
their pharmacy on Francis Street three weeks each summer
just before the Fourth of July. Forever
Grandma must shake my scalped, blue-eyed noggin awake long before dawn
while Twigs ropes the tarp down on the truckbed.
Grandma, a rough and ready volunteer, wears a thick flak jacket
above loose, gardener's trousers. She feeds me Kellogg's Corn Flakes®
and makes me slurp the milk down to the grainy residue of sugar.
The sod-grey and bulbous International® pickup coughs and spits,
stirring though not quite rousing the three or four songbirds
which clutch the branches of the maples, claw-like in silhouette.
The nineteen-sixties, flush out of promises, have dissolved,
and Twigs is long washed away with them; not even his cottages remain to the family.
Those cottages. In the '70s, three weeks a year
my folks kept to one, growling at each other in the TV glare.
The other cottage, built above the boathouse,
switched off between different aunts and uncles
who lounged on the lakeview balcony
with The Detroit Free Press, Miller Lite®, and a Jacqueline Susanne.
The sun seeping through the spruce
upon the coarse pine siding kept the world at spades. In Twigs' day
there was no balcony and no siding; only one thin crust of tarpaper.
No birthday wrap came more modest than this,
when after the day-long drive, with a lunch stop in Standish,
Twigs hauled the baggage up the loose-plank ramp with an old wheelbarrow.
The muck pits that sloped underneath, sticky, dank and pulpous,
were later landscaped over with gravel and grass.
Not for me
to scamper again, deferential, like a bag of loose Legos®
up and down a jury-rigged ramp.
Twigs, forget Grandma's trash, let's look for petosky stones!
Let's grab the shovel from the boat house,
let's conjure night crawlers from that magic muck;
let's forget about long, lingering dying
and the way years crash over rocks
like white caps that bite the shore. Watch them roil
that fool-hearty aluminum fishing boat anchored alone on the lake,
boat without enough sense to come in home.
This poem previously appeared in Bukunin.