About the Dead: Poems

Only Then

[66] O n Ly T h e n The hemingway Short Story is a stubby, torpedo shaped cigar that responds well to fire. it lasts in the way we last: smoke of our body becoming air, becoming breeze, becoming the cold front that slams its thick skull against a tree, against a forest, against the town, where as a boy, i slept with a brown teddy bear —threadbare buttons in its grooved sockets—that bear had seen it all come and go and knew the familiar sting of quarrelsome parents lighting the hallway, had often buried itself in the backyard under the silver maple: a makeshift graveyard where the sun fell to its knees, the winsome sun pressing a shadow against another grave. i left flowers. My father would light those stubby brown cigars and lean over the rail of the back deck like a Buddhist shaving his head in the dark; he would smoke and stare past the forest and imagine the coming winter and the next and before long his parturient gaze fell back upon the house, and i could smell the rush of spent tobacco as he brushed past. i can smell it now. We don’t talk about such things in polite conversation although i wish we could. Then i could [67] show you the night a tree fell on our house, the truculent wind escaping the forest’s lungs, the lightning bluing our crushed wooden deck, my mother’s ruffled blackwatch nightgown, felled tree snug against the roof, a hundred years of growing towards this scene. ...