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)