|
Michelle Boisseau
Done
And then the white gloves fold the flag, falling
snow snuffed inside, and hand it to your mother,
good gray coat, fifty-two years married.
Snow rides into our shoes. Birds in the snow,
our children’s bright queries don’t break
the swollen quiet. Too late now. Windshield wipers
slap the snow away. Where silence ended, it stays.
He never told his children he loved them,
or touched them in affection, except a scouring
of the head, or, when grown, a handshake,
a tap on the arm. He never apologized.
He couldn’t recite Shakespeare, wouldn’t stretch out
with an espionage novel or sing in a piano bar
tunes from Gigi. He played the accordion
and with his wife at weddings led a polka
expertly among the quick couples, his face
nearly flickering with pleasure. When he read
it was the Stevens Point Journal, sales
and obituaries. He learned a trade.
He didn’t go to college, or to high school.
Sent off as a farmhand at twelve, he sent money home
that couldn’t save the farm. And once in 1935
he watched all night from an open freight car
the billowing immaterial of northern lights.
He didn’t spend the war at a desk job, honing
practical jokes on the base’s PA system.
He didn’t break down, never lost a job.
He measured twice and cut once. He built
a house, he built a bigger house.
He was foreman, he was union.
He never took his children to the circus
and riled the lions with his echoing roar.
He didn’t climb the trellis to the porch roof
and wail in the windows at his wife.
He never watched his sons pitch Little League,
or appeared in the stands at wrestling matches,
or bragged about them at bus stops.
He was an officer in the St. Joseph Altar Society.
He paid cash for all the weddings
of his daughters he didn’t encourage,
and he didn’t stagger around the motel pool
in his socks. And in later years if he’d won
a few hands of pinochle against a visiting son
he might begin to talk, matter-of-factly,
about Omaha Beach, June 9, 1944,
his company of engineers landing
where the surf was still bobbing, the sand
still festering with burst cartons of bodies,
and over them he lugged his gear, fuel lines
for tanks, fresh grease for the machines.
MICHELLE BOISSEAU teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Her second book, Understory, won the 1996 Morse Prize from Northeastern
University Press. She has new work appearing in The Georgia Review,
The Ohio Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
“Done” appears in our Spring
2001 issue.
|
