Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen
See that handsome fellow to the left there? Arthur McGhee, my grandfather. The man knew how to wear a suit and hat. He never left for a restaurant or church or a wedding or any official event without dressing to perfection, and he stood straight and tall and lean. He was calm and patient. He was also devilish – he used to tear off bits of paper napkin and make tiny spitballs out of them, which he stored up beneath the rim of his plate and threw at unsuspecting victims throughout dinner, something which never failed, over many decades, to crack my grandmother up. One of my abiding memories of him is watching him wash up in the back entry after chores, lathering up with a bar of Lava soap. Another abiding memory is of sitting on his lap while he recited poems to me, poems he’d memorized in grade school. He didn’t finish high school, but so what? Sometimes I drive to his and my grandmother’s adjoining graves in upstate New York and I sit there and talk to them. In the middle of the night last week I went searching for Joyce Sutphen poems to read myself back to sleep. She didn’t know my grandfather, but she could have. She knows that the world needs more farmer poets, electrician poets, line cook poets, plumber poets, hardware poets, homemaker poets. She brings my childhood back to me.
Just For the Record
– Joyce Sutphen
It wasn’t like that. Don’t imagine
my father in a feed cap, chewing
a stem of alfalfa, spitting occasionally.
No bib-overalls over bare shoulders,
no handkerchief around his neck.
Don’t imagine he didn’t shave every morning.
The buildings on his farm weren’t
weathered gray; the lawns were always mowed.
Don’t imagine a car in the weeds.
I tell you this because you have certain
ideas about me, about farmers
and their daughters.
You imagine him bumbling along, some
hayseed, when really, he wore his dark
suit as gracefully as Cary Grant.
The one thing you’re right about
is that he worked too hard. You can’t
imagine how early and how late.
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