The smell of roast beef and browning potatoes grew stronger, caught in the dimness of the stairwell between the street door's stained glass and the climb to the dining room, where my father was a black-and-white unrecognizable child with a collie above the sideboard; and the old woman who lived alone with a brass bedstead huddled in her furniture - all that was left after time and death. Her face was a blurred baked apple surrounded by the canaries' fluff - dandelions of song wired in the window's sun. Under the table her black shoes hid with her arthritic legs that bloated above the laces into pastry bags of pain. But I never knew him because he died before I was two, before my memory could arrange him to the trophy of a grandpa, as she became grandma with a foreign voice, canaries, a silver creamer, and crippled legs. Grandma and Grandpa one sound and one silence, as light is to shadow, presence to absence, conscious to unconscious, fact to the dark nimbus that is not knowledge, but is fishhooked with questions, always they divide. She is visible. He is the phosphorescent man. In the Brooklyn house where I first found I wanted to find him, her silver was behind my glass face on the corner cupboard. His books hung in their black bindings cracking in the steam heat - Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg - behind my breath on the bookcases' glass doors. To see, to touch, that is all I know of him. The rest is photographs, a wedding moustache and a man holding my father for a Sunday photograph in a dustless curling brim beyond the frame. Beyond that there are other people's stories. My father remembers his father, a man who preferred Brooklyn to his patrimony of acres by the Baltic Sea, eating the roast beef in silence, walking down to the basement past the banistered angles while his wife played the piano. He read before the furnace's open door - alone with the flames and the page. The piano far away, compartment by compartment of floors and ceilings, sang to the wired yellow wings as the coal settled into ash and clinkers until she rang him to bed with a silver knife on the radiator. She snuffed out the canaries with hoods made from leftover bits of curtain and covered the keys of her music. He banked the fire, closed the furnace door. The clang of embers followed his finger in its place in the book, up the banisters' barred shadows as he put out the lights landing by landing. I see him as my father tells it, but I know him the way the artist knows Plato's Ideal - a second removed remembrance a picture of a man a story of a man. Some people have graves but some have only stones, and you cannot bring them the ransom of flowers or flags on appropriate days because you do not know where they died. Someone walked alone in his own where; after the music was over and the coals caught their burnt out stones in the grate, he extinguished the shadows lamp by lamp that clung to the stair obstinate as salt. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...GUILIELMUS REX by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO A REDBREAST, THAT FLEW INTO A HOUSE ... by ELIZABETH BENTLEY IDYLL 7. OF HYACINTHUS by BION ON THE DEATH OF ANNE BRONTE by CHARLOTTE BRONTE AN ELEGY ON THE LADY PEN; SENT TO MY MISTRESS OUT OF FRANCE by THOMAS CAREW HALT AND PARLEY by GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE |