I Remember Sunday Mornings
Sunday mornings on Quaker Church Road
I’m awakened by the sound of percolations and
the scent of Maxwell House flowing into the bedroom.
The radio played the station of the sisters
with their prayer of Saint Frances,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
My grandfather sat in his chair
between the white-painted radiator
and the gray Formica dinette table,
his right arm rested on his right thigh
as the smoke from that hand drifts
past his face toward the ceiling.
At the grocery store, I was two,
sitting in the cart. Grandpa went away
for almost a year of a minute.
I cried until he brought himself back
to save me
with that red-striped carton of Luckies.
He taught me the use of power saw and other tools,
made our bows and arrows with his pen knife,
and drove us to the PA relatives in coal country.
My grandfather taught me a few new words,
emphysema, cyanotic, hypoxia,
but only after he could no longer use words.
My mother drove over to check
and found him sprawled
across that clean linoleum kitchen floor.
Weeks later, I came into his hospital room
and peeked through the curtains surrounding his bed.
Behind the screen, a scene of nursing neglect.
In the quiet, Grandfather balanced himself,
naked, struggling above the used bedpan,
large dark pink scrotal sack hung slack.
His eyes asked my 19-year-old almost a man,
to take the burden from beneath him;
No shame between us, as I comply.
And last,
Grandmother asked me, oldest, her favorite,
to help her pull the soft burial blanket
over those coffin-closed blue eyes.
The Fires This Time
Nature notices paradox.
Haven’t we been faithful enough?
Idling against the noon heat
of the August parking lot asphalt,
driver in the post office, mailing something,
the big diesel pumps out the hot exhaust,
the cab kept cool,
the engine measuring
drops of fuel.
Wet black on the ground
as the oil fumes
spill into the air,
rising in carbon freedom
to reflect molecular heat back to the earth.
Are we not good enough servants of the land?
Husbands of the earth?
The comfort of the empty pretty blue truck cab awaits the driver,
driving the heavens into the hot punishment purgatory
and on to hell.
How many joules in a kilowatt hour?
3,600,000.
Wasn’t the knowledge of good and evil
gained from the apple
enough to save the Earth?
1.94 megajoules brews a cup on my Keurig.
I let it cool through neglect and heat it in the microwave,
only 24,000 joules a second.
The heat of the engines goes off into air.
Doesn’t hot air rise into the cold sky and cool off?
If we don’t pay attention to the science,
can we pray our way out of this?
A British Thermal Unit equals 1,055.0585 joules.
One Kilowatt Hour is equal to 3,412.141633 BTUs.
In our house, from June 13 to August 14, we used 1,584.000 KWHs.
Good thing we were in Vancouver using Canadian Energy for two of those weeks.
Not driving, not using air conditioning much.
Well, except during the night.
Can we get credit at the end for that bit less?
Mother nature disagrees with a heat hammer.
On British Thermal Units:
Therm = 100,000 BTUs
All you need is about 96.7 cubic feet
of natural gas to produce a therm.
But didn’t some good father know the science
and teach it to us as we left Eden?
Was it the fire next time that burned the Hell out of Paradise, California?
Or the fire last time?
If we get off the grid,
can we get out of the zone?
Off the grid, without a footprint?
Can the sins of the heat be left behind,
behind to save us from the future?
The human exhales at 91.76° F.
This morning, I inhaled 42 degrees and exhaled 91.76 degrees.
Inhale air—21% O2, 78% N
Exhale air—16% O2, 4% CO2, 78% N
Greenhouse effect?
Hothouse effect?
Madhouse effect?
How long do we need to get the revelation?
I breathe as the world heats, burning.
How long can we hold our breaths?
There He Is
At the sound of the leash,
remembering,
as paws once leaped
from side to side
in lively anticipation.
He reminds us
of that time of puppy pleasures.
The dreams make his old body
move more willingly
than his master’s love now can.
Are the old tricks
worth walking
past the food bowl?
The sun rests
with warm comfort
on the carpet or the grass,
He still seeks the pleasure
of that space behind the ear
when scratched.
The trick is
to rise to the occasion.
Today,
it seems not worth the effort.
Let sleeping memory suffice.
The Threat of Losing Her Hangs Heavy
On an evening, fifty years ago,
three boys sat with their dad
around the kitchen table, playing cards.
They all hoped her mother heart
would be fixed by the surgeon’s blade.
None had words to sort feelings
into their own heart chambers.
The dad hated to lose at cards—or life,
hated to be wrong,
always had the last word
or worse.
All four were in danger of losing
the woman whose chest
would be split on another table
in the morning.
The game could’ve been
gin rummy, canasta,
or hearts, but the thinking was
Mother,
(even Dad called her that),
lying in the hospital awaiting a procedure
still dangerous in those early days.
Maybe it was a misplayed card
or a sarcastic remark that ignited
the emotional fumes of the room.
It could have been a heart that flew
across the room when his anger grew.
Brother number two, high school senior
about to spring free of this place forever,
would not take blame again for nothing
again this night.
Both rose in the moment,
with the man came a beer bottle
grasped by its throat,
dripping down the upraised arm.
The oldest, a sophomore college kid
rises from the father’s right,
stands nose to nose,
creating a still-life tableau.
The forgotten self of the father
begins to return.
He lowers the arm
the bottle drops to the cluttered floor.
The youngest brother sits in the midst,
collateral to the conflict.
Dad orders the boy across the table
to the bedroom. As the stairs creak,
the older males gradually descend
to their chairs, still face to face.
“Dad, you have to go up to apologize.”
And to his credit, he does.
As She Left It
The widowed neighbor’s son cut down
the huge blue spruce at the fence,
giving us a view of the old yard
hinting the history of its youth.
The life-size doe in repose, adorned by the once-red
Christmasy ribbon around her neck
looks over the fence toward us.
The remains of the garden flowers,
now dried with grown-up weeds
overtake the walkways.
The peach tree is loaded to the ground
with tired branches breaking under the weight
of the neglected fruit.
The far side of the tree is dead, with dried gray brittle branches
woven among the green ones, long since ready
for the rusted pruning shears lying against the house.
The love she put into the yard faded with her ability to move
through her gardener’s tasks.
Now lawn chairs and garden gnomes vie for viewing
above the cheat grass that crowds the space,
where evening drinks were once
served to husband and friends.
Artificial flowers set in the decorative bucket
weren’t replaced last Spring or
perhaps the year before.
The sun has long beaten the color from their faux pedals.
During the year we were getting to know her.
She talked about her decades here.
Did echoes of her husband’s laughter gently shake memories free?
The hands that cared for the growing things
slowed over the widowed years.
Her brain branches dying like the peach limbs,
leaving weak, misshapen fruit among dried stems.
Her son tells us she lives in a different present than the rest of us,
thinking strangers haunt the bodies of loved ones,
perhaps able to remember some life in the garden she loved,
dying its parallel death with her.