Sunday, June 21, 2015

A Poem from 1976

For Father's Day:  Seventy years ago next month my father had returned from a year and a half in England and made plans to marry my mother.  My mother's father had died in 1931.  She had worked nine to five for fifteen years.  My Uncle Elmer was to give her away at the wedding, which was at the house.  For six years my parents lived next door to the house, where the grandparents had lived.  They had died during the war.  This was a poem I wrote remembering a vacation back from college. 1968, in 1976. 

ONE DAY IN MY SUMMER YOUTH 

One day in my summer youth
I carried my drawing book into the rain.
At the old town dock I drew
the fish scattered strangely
on the old brown planks,
then walked uphill to the vacant house
my uncle owns.  I sat
on the covered porch where my play-pen
held me long ago and drew
the mill, carefully – cranes,
and the light piles of lumber
with the sweetest smell on earth.

Eventually my uncle looked around
the corner of the porch and found me.
We walked uphill to the house
they all lived in, long before
I was born, and before the war. 

One of my earliest memories
is of my uncle holding me
on his knee, reading me
the funny papers.  I remember
him pointing at each word
of NANCY AND SLUGGO. 

Before the war my uncle was a barber.
He kept his scissors
and would set me or my sister
on the closed treadle sewing machine
to cut our hair like the dutch.
 
He worked at a mill
in the cloud of industry
that is the tideflats
Once he fell from his place
into a conveyor belt and held fast
to a metal bar above him.
The machine abused him
and went on without him.
It must have seemed
a long, long time before
friends found him.

My mother took me to see him
in the hospital bed.
He had been ready to let go,
he said.  He lifted the sheet
and I saw his bruises.
I did not know that bruises
ever could be hurtful to me. 

(Feb '76)

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