Category: Family Poems

FAMILY HEIRLOOMS

Jewels like fireflies fluttering

In the shadows of spruce and cedar

Are recollections of yesterday’s children.

Out of the corner of my eye

I see legs dangling from beds

Heads disappearing down stairwells.

I hear five siblings faintly

Slamming doors or crying or

Giggling in mossy clearings

They leave things for us to find:

A size-three sandal once

Red under a brushpile.

These children today live nowhere

Until a marble rolls

Out from under a radiator

Or my brush tangles in the dog’s

Bush like a comb in waist-

Long shining brown hair,

Or sitting on the couch with a book,

Making mouths at me,

My granddaughter crinkles her eyes.

A THANK YOU NOTE FOR THE CAST OF “THE RINK”

Still high, stoned on nostalgia,

I go into the parking lot

Humming the theme song of the play.

Like stage scenery, the sky

Shimmers with crystal.  The moon

Is a glitterball on a chain

Where any father can pull it down

For his daughter.  Look at Arcturus,

A Hope diamond on black velvet:

Follow the arc of the dipper

And you can put your finger on it.

Music and colored lights:

Ghetto kids have overdosed on them

Spacing on strobe beams and

Hard rock nuclear blasts.

Ma and Pa have split,

Riding roller coaster rainbows.

They have outgrown magicians,

Circuses, carnivals and state fairs.

They’re outward bound for Xanadu.

Tickets are only a dollar a minute.

I can remember circling

In the warm New Hampshire honey-

Suckle -scented night,

Skate wheels clicking like a locomotive

On the tracks to Monterey,

Round and round the roller rink,

Silky in my rayon dress,

Hoping a boy would smile at me,

Proud of my lace collar.

The jukebox played the Beer Barrel

Polka round and round

Until the lights dimmed for “Couples Only”

And I rejoined my parents.

Songs in the car, my mother’s mellow contralto
The white fringe of birches framing Lake Chocorua
Her trudge up the Jewell Trail wearing a dress:
Calling out blazes on granite slabs
Spying the next cairn, the misty channel
Marker – or so I like to recall although
In truth my father may have been ahead.

How I resented the leash that reined me to them
After my toddler’s wobble toward the road
Where Model T’s jolted like windup toys.
The clothesline pulley ran me like a dog.
I was the bass my father trolled for what
Seemed hours in lucid lakes of northern Maine.
“You are all we’ve got, ” he often said
Spanking me whenever I crossed the street.

Today my mother came home from the hospital
Short of breath, unsure of the order of pills.
I cooked and laundered, fetched her water and kleenex
And snapped at the choke chain tightening on my neck
The way our shepherd balks at the door of the pen
Until we looked at curling photographs:
Her home-made lacy graduation dress
The boy with his bicycle twenty-five miles from home.