Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. ~Song of Solomon 8:7
Grandfather used to read me
his poetry in endless volumes.
They were filled with Sioux Indians,
muddy Wisconsin dance halls,
the furrows of ninety years.
On a crushed velvet couch he spoke
lines to a first betrothed, dead at nineteen.
To a railroad President or an adorned Shulamite.
He whispered poems to his father, his image of Yahveh.
My seven-year-old thoughts curled
placid around this thesaurus,
tugging at long, wrinkled earlobes.
Watching his steady movement, reading his ocean eyes.
Grandfather said he cried himself to sleep
when he couldn’t take care of Grandmother anymore.
At ten years old, I wrote my second poem
on the first night in fifty years
he couldn’t hear her breathing.
I watched him die when I was fourteen in a room full of machines.
A sunken torso filled with lost golf balls, lopsided stacks of crumpled prose.
Trapped in a pink soap room without his feathered hat, opera tapes
or those leather-bound fragments of his soul.
From a single motorized hospital bed,
cloudy sockets swam into California fog
as I clutched the iron rail lingering in
his final coursing soliloquy.
As my father read “Do Not Go Gentle” next
to his oaken casket, I slipped into
those afternoons, reaching for Grandfather’s poetry.
slipped quietly among ten fair-haired grandchildren,
his words rolling through veins of the sea.
