January 2019
Joan Colby
JoanMC@aol.com
JoanMC@aol.com
Note: With the suggested option of Women/Men as a topic, I had submitted generic "women" poems for December. I find though, that as a woman, I have written quite a few such poems, but my poems for men are always for specific men. In this case, my father and my grandfather.
FATHER SESTINA
This is the way you would take a picture
Stooped, squinting, fingers framing like memory
The delicate angle. Then snap, stars
Dazzled my eyes. In acid basins, we bloomed like plants
Under infrared light in a garden
Of chemicals. In the album now, all of us yellow.
And curl about the edges. How you loved yellow
Forsythia, jonquils, lilies. Filling your pictures
In generous sprays just as in each garden
Of every house we lived in there is a memory.
Long ago on a Carolina plantation
An ancestor scattered seeds like stars
Until the whole dark earth was starry
With a sense of possibility, a yellow
Surge of energy and passion. Everywhere you planted
Flowers, trees, dreams, the ultimate pictures
I still imagine flowering in memories.
Father in my life you made a garden
Of sprouting wishes. I learned then gardeners
Are thoughtful men pondering starflowers
In the middle of winter, trusting the memory
Of earth to decode each cryptic seed yellow
As a riot of spring blossom. All those pictures
Hang in my mind, implants
Organs of love. To be a planter
Takes time and care. The smallest garden
Pleads for supervision, to be captured like a picture
By an eye that senses the kinship of stars
To everything. Everything reels, a suffusion of yellow
Light. I walk in to the chapel of memories
And there you lie memorizing
Nothing. You once took my hand and planted
Ideas, filled my head with yellow
Notions of daffodils and tulips. This garden
Now blooms with stones, remote as stars
Carrying away your name. Only pictures
Remain in memory, that rich garden,
All that you planted there glistens like stars
Or tears, yellow roses on your coffin, your shuttered face stopping the picture.
Midwest Literary Magazine
PAPA
In the cellar by the boiler
You jacked the house up to install
Long before I came along.
You take a swallow of your beer,
Eject a dog-colored stream
Into the brass spittoon. Tell me how
An orphan, taken in by farmers
For unpaid labor, you forgot the bread
Baking in the woodstove. A beating
Was certain, so you fled, 12 years old
Riding the rails west.
In the mines, you drove a mule train, liked
Horses better, just like me. You
Joined the Wobblies, damn the bosses.
Met Mary and got hitched after courting
With a rented nag and buggy.
Seven kids, four lived. You loaded coal
On the docks at Calumet. Your tongue
Sliced for cancer, you still had your chaw
Until the day you collapse
Shoveling snow, too stubborn
To wait for help.
Driftwood Bay
FATHER SESTINA
This is the way you would take a picture
Stooped, squinting, fingers framing like memory
The delicate angle. Then snap, stars
Dazzled my eyes. In acid basins, we bloomed like plants
Under infrared light in a garden
Of chemicals. In the album now, all of us yellow.
And curl about the edges. How you loved yellow
Forsythia, jonquils, lilies. Filling your pictures
In generous sprays just as in each garden
Of every house we lived in there is a memory.
Long ago on a Carolina plantation
An ancestor scattered seeds like stars
Until the whole dark earth was starry
With a sense of possibility, a yellow
Surge of energy and passion. Everywhere you planted
Flowers, trees, dreams, the ultimate pictures
I still imagine flowering in memories.
Father in my life you made a garden
Of sprouting wishes. I learned then gardeners
Are thoughtful men pondering starflowers
In the middle of winter, trusting the memory
Of earth to decode each cryptic seed yellow
As a riot of spring blossom. All those pictures
Hang in my mind, implants
Organs of love. To be a planter
Takes time and care. The smallest garden
Pleads for supervision, to be captured like a picture
By an eye that senses the kinship of stars
To everything. Everything reels, a suffusion of yellow
Light. I walk in to the chapel of memories
And there you lie memorizing
Nothing. You once took my hand and planted
Ideas, filled my head with yellow
Notions of daffodils and tulips. This garden
Now blooms with stones, remote as stars
Carrying away your name. Only pictures
Remain in memory, that rich garden,
All that you planted there glistens like stars
Or tears, yellow roses on your coffin, your shuttered face stopping the picture.
Midwest Literary Magazine
PAPA
In the cellar by the boiler
You jacked the house up to install
Long before I came along.
You take a swallow of your beer,
Eject a dog-colored stream
Into the brass spittoon. Tell me how
An orphan, taken in by farmers
For unpaid labor, you forgot the bread
Baking in the woodstove. A beating
Was certain, so you fled, 12 years old
Riding the rails west.
In the mines, you drove a mule train, liked
Horses better, just like me. You
Joined the Wobblies, damn the bosses.
Met Mary and got hitched after courting
With a rented nag and buggy.
Seven kids, four lived. You loaded coal
On the docks at Calumet. Your tongue
Sliced for cancer, you still had your chaw
Until the day you collapse
Shoveling snow, too stubborn
To wait for help.
Driftwood Bay
© 2018 Joan Colby
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