Vovo

I saw her last foreshortened in her coffin,Propped like a puppet in a little box,The rigid insult—silent stillness—of deathCompounded by this extra lesseningTo toylike nothing, husk of has-been flesh.Formerly, she'd been merely short and shapeless,Thanks to her fat and twenty years of black—Bandanna, shawl, and dress enfolding allBut pallid toothless blue-eyed smiling face,Cheery indifference of the agèd widow.(Of all the things she said, I just recallThree words: "Ramon, vem cá!"—"Raymond, come here!"Which I could never do, except to hug her.)

I see in early photos contoured cheekbones,A sculptured face with teeth to shape her jaw:Beautiful as her name, Francisca, néeTavares. Earlier, before the voyageTo Boston, nineteen-hundred, when she lost Her land and language, she had had a futureAt first as common as the fresh-turned earth,Girl of Pilar, Bretanha, São Miguel,Açores, Portugal—the sort of fadoSung to her peasant sort for centuries:A husband good for children, little wealth,And tearful strife between his wine and work;Sunday church becoming daily with age.But Chica found António, whom the priestHad taught to read, whose writing like engravingAmazed the letterless and promised greatness,And who would take her past the common fateWith strength and handsomeness and brains, and did.

Earlier, little girl now wholly lost(Except I've heard her cottage floor was dirt),She played in honest light and air, the eighteenSeventies in Pilar, which came and wentAs slowly, quickly, finally as timeWill do, like yours, like mine; leaving her childhoodForever in the freedom of forgetting,Unlike that coffined husk I can't forget.