my grandfather was resurrected today,
in all manner of momentarily, a whole string of instants
he stood behind me as i stared at the tangible remnant
of my firmest memory of that old man

the night before i had been out late, making an ass out of myself in a circle of people composed primarily of those whom i know in too many ways to quickly explain, there was a bottle of mescal making slow rotations and i had a drum in my lap; i’m certain that i sang, perhaps even well enough to frighten away the less foolish people whom i did not know

i remember cracking walnuts
in the closely cluttered atmosphere of that barn
i remember the oil that would be pressed out
onto a dusty floor

so far as i am able to report, my grandfather had only one use for that aged vice on the oft repaired table just inside the barn, for all i ever knew, the only function of that tool was to crack all these black walnuts which littered the ground

a cousin of mine today,
cigarette in one hand - beer in the other
during a conversation ’bout them ol’ boys
living on the fringe
carting about scrap metal,
of which grandpa’s barn had yielded quite a pile
to be collected and exchanged for currency;
told me he was up there laughing at us,
because we wound up having to deal with all his shit -

i got home at two a.m. and having had the benefit of not needing to drive, i was out there - out there to the point where i do believe i quoted from finnegan’s wake, and i know the period of time that involved my transport home was really just an impressionistic blur of neon wars somehow waged against all these beautiful people that i am so blessed to know

i showed up
about fifteen minutes past the time
which had been told to me
i showed up
hung-over as hell
and i found that a congregation -
of what i can only term honest folk,
ol’ boys from the church who’ve bought my grandparents land
already had an amazing amount of the barn cleaned out

fifth wheel;

damn -

another revelation regarding the situation where; given a society that could actually embrace the human as the human wishes to be, the joke is that;

given that ideal society . . .

i would not be

(something of a specialized sequence of lines right there, i most especially hope that my father understands [how i can write that, feel that, understand that, and smile at that . . . in my own odd way] the rest of you can cope) and yet here i am . . .

i showed up -
(employ your own
suitable rhymes
and reasons)

it’s odd, my grandfather,
i remember feeling like such an outcast at his funeral
i remember that the entire experience of his death -
the fact of being able to watch (from what i felt to be a position of detatchment)
this unwieldy, never fully understood,
concept of family go through grief -
inspired me
to the first story
i would still dare to call literary . . .
(laughing as i label it)

and i never knew the man
who ultimately had inspired it -

which was part of the story, yet i knew that more then ever today,
as i wandered around casting a covetous eye across the piles
of detritus -
which today, in all manner of moments,
resurrected my grandfather

and i saw him clearer
than i ever had

standing in front of that vice
with the half-shell of a black walnut
sitting behind the toolbox,
having pawed through the relics of things
which meant mostly nothing to me

i listened to my aunts and uncles,
cousins and such,
speak about objects and how they link -

well no; not quite

but as the truckloads flew out of the loft
and the piles that had been pushed out in haste
were picked at and plundered,

i thought i saw how it all works

yes, that again - the night before i’d staggered away into the darkness; drink having sunk into the drunk . . . and needing egress; and what with it being the sort of place where you can actually see stars, i stepped into the cold world that exists when the winds are strong and the hour is late;

it can be dreadful away from the fire

when i turned back and looked
when i started walking -

returning to warmth;
it can be a beautiful thing

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 2:51 am and is filed under indiscriminate, philosophy, poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.