For my Seventh Birthday
I got my last dead grandpa,
I saw daddy cry.
By most accounts,
my first dead grandpa
was a saint.
I mostly remember
pictures.
And folks, including
my last grandma,
who will never quite be dead,
thought my last grandpa was a jerk.
He doted on us grandkids
we all missed him,
my grandma lived alone
in the little green house
on the farm
by the big pond.
I guessed her lonely
though she never said
not to me,
within two years
she married her
high school sweetheart
and became Grandma Brown
This is not the story of my dead grandpas,
and come to think of it, I had three.
The last, JB Brown, she buried, too,
but lived in his little house
on Santa Clara in Jackson
until she died.
This is about smell of soap.
Grandma Brown had one hall bathroom
as old houses do
outside a floor furnace,
almost burned bare feet.
The bathroom, unheated,
save steamy bathwater,
cold linoleum
but a plush rug
spared one when drying.
Over-the-john cabinet
of golden plastic
held spare tissue and soap
there, between the soft imagery
of nude children bathing
the aroma blossomed in heavy air
a sweet perfume of ladies soap
in a small boy’s nose
All the grandpa’s and grandma’s have been dead a generation, the houses, too
the lone remainder is the smell
and when I die it will be gone
for no one else alive will remember
standing cold and clean in the little Santa Clara house in Jackson, feeling the chill, the softness of the rug, steamy little prints faded from years of moisture, the coldness of the floor off the rug, the burn and cut of the furnace as one trod across to a bedroom to dress.
This painting, I hold in my head, of smells and memories and touches of cold and hot, locket size, fits only in my mind, if I can share it, maybe someday, someone, long after I am gone will and know what an old man knows, what a small boy knew, a thing that was wholly good, a thing to hold a lifetime, after bodies have rotted, after bulldozers smash old houses, after the air has become too polluted to breathe, in some place, where the world I knew is almost forgotten, maybe someone will see and smell whatever soap they have and imagine they can remember steamy air turning to cold and feel of the towel,
drying, drying,
out to the furnace and on swiftly as it burns and cuts, to the cool dark bedroom to dress warmly to go out with the cousins and play down by the creek in the cold Christmas air.
For my Grandma Brown, and the amazing Al Filreis who never got to meet her.
(It is hard to express how much I dislike long poems, as I am a firm believer if you need more than 100 words, you need an editor or another poem, but I cannot manage to make this any shorter than 448 words.)
