Old Bones

Dinner: circa 1965

Dinner is a private excavation into family, a daily social interaction primeval.  Dinner is a truce between Mom and Dad who chew their food while holding back opposite views on The War. It’s a lesson in etiquette: what to do when your mouth is full of stories and the phone rings and it’s your best friend and you’re not allowed to leave the table. What to do when the paper boy comes to your front door wanting payment for the latest front-page gore about the War.

Dinner is a mealtime prayer followed by a diatribe against student protesters and long-haired draft dodgers. Dinner is talk about the price of gas and groceries. Dinner is me asking my youngest brother to Please pass the milk and then saying Thank you.

Dinner is tuna casserole spooned like army rations onto Melmac.  Dinner is Operation Rolling Thunder and watching Channel 9 news to hear a report on Viet Cong, communists, gooks, guerrillas, and GIs. It’s elbows off the table, chin off my plate, chewing with my mouth closed while listening to yesterday’s body count added to the sum from the day before. It is my oldest brother, his long, red hair dragging in beef gravy, tearing up his draft notice.

Dinner is whispers about friends of friends who bought a car with bloodshed money given to them in exchange for their son’s life. Dinner is me quibbling with Mom about whose turn it is to do the dishes. (Who will clear the table and who will wash and who will dry?)

Dinner, circa 1965, is a knock on the door and Marines bearing the news of a soldier’s death. Dinner, circa 1965, is a heavy body bag that is dragged through napalm jungle to decompose in front of us on the kitchen table.  Dinner, circa 1965, is a family in a far-off village who sits down to eat bombs that have fallen from heaven into their bowls of rice.

Dinner: circa 2000

An immigrant family from a bombed-out village lives in the kitchen of my youth. The family eats dinner slowly, with mouths closed, wary of exposing battle scars, wary of choking on old bones that no one else can swallow.

Technorati Tags: Vietnam,1965,Operation Rolling Thunder

Cinderella

Cinderella, a red tulip of a girl,
labors to free herself
from her glass slipper.

It holds her fast, prettily,
like a Waterford vase
constrains a flower.

The clock strikes twelve.

Petals fall.  Stems droop.
Water evaporates and
blossoms are dumped

from cut glass to haute trash.
In darkness, Cinderella
rummages the dumpster,

searching for her
bygone beautiful self.
Meanwhile, vase and slipper

sit empty, ready to enclose
the next beauty.

Technorati Tags: Cinderella,shoe

Homage to Summer

You and I have traveled well together for many years.  Orange, blue, blue, yellow, white, silver blue: I have trusted you in all your incarnations.  We have seen seedlings become trees, and we have seen trees bursting with buds turn green then red then winter bare.  We have seen trees ravaged by insects and latticed by woodpeckers.  We have seen scores of trees bend and break in the path of tornadic storms.  We have seen trees cut, quartered, dismembered, mulched, and then hauled away by earsplitting trucks.  We have seen trees in splendor and in despair.

It is now October of our accumulated years together.  The trumpeter swans have returned to winter in the nearby lake; the hummingbirds have all flown to sunnier climes.  The nights are getting longer and soon you and I will part company for six full moons.  While I retreat to my chair to read beside the fireplace, you will stand in wait behind locked doors. 

As the ground thaws and the trees grow pregnant with buds, I shall leave the warmth of the house to cross the dormant lawn.  Ever so carefully, with failing eyes, I will turn the dial clockwise, counterclockwise, then clockwise again.  Reluctant, the battered lock will release and the doors to the shed will fold open like rose petals in the spring.  

There I will find you with dust clinging to your lean frame and flat tires looking forlorn from the long winter.  No matter.  I will dust you off and air you up and we will ride through the forest in reverence, breathing in pine, dazzled by the light.