Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Against the Remains

                                                                        
Against the Remains
                           Morning Sun Edward Hopper, 1952, oil
Certainly, you sit, not at the edge
of the bed, close to the window;
but at its center (his center)
where Hopper’s placed you,
told you to stay and to sit still
like any good wife should do.
       
Do you regret it, Josephine?
How willingly you traded
revelry for solitude; vivaciousness
for silent-slants-of-the-sun
on houses, invading sparse
rooms and empty streets.

Looking out that window, do you see
what he paints? Is the long length
of the red brick building with windows
like glass-eyed spies watching
color fade from your skin
as charm from a marriage?

Maybe those barren buildings
remind you of red ochre
stained walls, shed unfertilized
with each passing moon, yet,

your salmon-pink slip
seductively clings to heaving
bosoms, falls from shoulders,
in his shadows and light¾
was it hard to put your brush
down and pick up your Eddie?

We all gaze at your sharp-cornered
cheeks, feel the flesh of chapped
hands you rest on your calves. Ennui
slips between shadow and wall¾
and onto your bed. Yet, how easy
to miss beauty against what remains.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Paper Father (revised)

Paper Father

You fell from her words
like sparse confetti¾

without explanation, sans celebration, so I gathered
what I could of you: your name (along with her own) on the certificate that linked us,
just above diminutive inked footprints. A funeral card
with your mother’s name, Anne Fitzsimmons Sell, along with childish love letters to her
(“I was painting walls today, the color was ‘wild rose’ with a virgin lamb’s wool roller”), posted on different days
(sultry maybe) of August and September, 1960.

I made you into what was needed¾ tertiary folds and creases like the furrows of a young girl’s brow until you were my origami father, pressed and turned until you were enough, a sort of paper doll papa, an image for me

like sometimes a musician who traveled with a band (I roller skated in the basement to her Percy Faith album, thinking maybe he, with his dark hair, was you)

or I’d re-fold you into a soldier, dead of course,
(or on optimistic days just missing-in-action like the boys
of Vietnam) only I would get mixed up¾maybe it was the beach in Normandy, or somewhere south of Heidelberg or maybe you were hush-hush because you were a masked hero like “The Lone Ranger” or “Batman.”

In church I made the sign of the cross and said the words In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen and wondered if you were He and she was like Mary and now you were 

up in the sky with my half-brother Jesus, only I would get mixed up¾and maybe you were the devil¾a monster of a father like in “Rosemary’s Baby.” I knew you could be no ordinary father.

Last year I decided to send for your army records (your death I found when I looked for you in the 80’s) and I got a letter in return saying they were lost in a fire, but I could send for your “Final Pay Voucher” for $20.00, the words on the form strange:

“Requester is: Next of kin of Deceased Veteran, Relationship: Daughter.”

I’ve put her death certificate in a folder with what I have of you, so there you are, together now, and the crease between my brow increases, as it will have to be good enough, these papers, they will have to be what I needed since we fall from ourselves, don’t we?

We fall from grace, a slip of the hip, an apple from the tree, a seed blown loose from the dandelion, until we can define it, put it to paper, bury it or re-classify it and claim names and paper fathers of our own.