Dear Grandfather,
Dear Grandfather,
This is what I know of you, from the beginning.
Your father was not an alcoholic, but a drinker who liked the ladies. The house in which you grew up was a wooden shack in the middle of a cotton field. At 16 you entered the Korean War and sent your paycheck home. When you came back you sold vacuum cleaners door to door and shipped freight from A to B in an eighteen-wheeler before leaving for Vietnam. Your four kids did not have everything, but they did not want.
Suddenly you turned Methodist. You had never been a religious man, so no one expected you to stand up in church and walk to the altar when the preacher called for new baptisms. From the banks your eight-year-old son and the rest of the church watched you wade into the small brown river in your Sunday clothes. You drove home wet and no one asked you why or what.
In 1975, you punched out my father, punched him out of the house. Today he can't remember why, but he has called you a stubborn man. You fought Parkinson's for twenty-one years, dementia for seven. I don't know how many bones you broke trying to get up from bed. I don't know what you were trying, or what I would have done if I were you. I believe you were stubborn, too.
This is all I know of you, but if I were to patch together these facts I would make a cloth so thin sunlight would obliterate it. I tried a little before your death to crawl into you like a child does a tree, I tried to coax out the truth of these facts by attempting poems about you, but I started late, I started so late, you could not speak and it was too late. I know now that you will be to me what the Marie Celeste and the big-chinned stones of Easter Island are to everyone else. But because of you I know about time. Thank you for teaching me about time.
Love,
A
This is what I know of you, from the beginning.
Your father was not an alcoholic, but a drinker who liked the ladies. The house in which you grew up was a wooden shack in the middle of a cotton field. At 16 you entered the Korean War and sent your paycheck home. When you came back you sold vacuum cleaners door to door and shipped freight from A to B in an eighteen-wheeler before leaving for Vietnam. Your four kids did not have everything, but they did not want.
Suddenly you turned Methodist. You had never been a religious man, so no one expected you to stand up in church and walk to the altar when the preacher called for new baptisms. From the banks your eight-year-old son and the rest of the church watched you wade into the small brown river in your Sunday clothes. You drove home wet and no one asked you why or what.
In 1975, you punched out my father, punched him out of the house. Today he can't remember why, but he has called you a stubborn man. You fought Parkinson's for twenty-one years, dementia for seven. I don't know how many bones you broke trying to get up from bed. I don't know what you were trying, or what I would have done if I were you. I believe you were stubborn, too.
This is all I know of you, but if I were to patch together these facts I would make a cloth so thin sunlight would obliterate it. I tried a little before your death to crawl into you like a child does a tree, I tried to coax out the truth of these facts by attempting poems about you, but I started late, I started so late, you could not speak and it was too late. I know now that you will be to me what the Marie Celeste and the big-chinned stones of Easter Island are to everyone else. But because of you I know about time. Thank you for teaching me about time.
Love,
A