Two short essays from SUCH DANCING AS WE CAN and an uncollected poem

                                Micah, Weeping, 1978

On Memorial Day, or Decoration, as village elders still called it, McClure’s Student Band played taps and the flag was lowered to half-staff.  I noticed Micah the plumber weeping.

The Vietnam War, over four decades past now, seemed three years dead and gone even then– to me, at least. Lord, I should have learned something by ‘78. A college roommate had been blown to pieces out there in ‘64, after all. That was in the era of American “advisers,” before anyone even knew where Vietnam lay.

My friend’s death had gotten me going in the non-stop ‘60s protest happening. I’ll tell you what: if we couldn’t have found the “enemy” on a map, we sure as hell knew how to party. I’ll tell you what too: we were full of crap, not merely about the war but a host of other things.

Well, maybe not full, but at least half.

My friends and I turned 80 last year. Those who remain, that is. But even at 26, I should have been a lot more sensitive than I was, inwardly sneering at our town’s tradesman, slumped on the village common, his shameless tears losing themselves in his multiple chins.

I shouldn’t have jeered him, even silently: Fat, goofy Micah and his whiskey-tears! I pictured him popping his khaki trousers, the seams blowing out of his army-issue shirt.

I should have had other things to imagine, of course. I get that now and should have then, but no one had shot at me, so I found it too easy to think that Micah just looked loopy, his cap dribbling down his head like a clump of snow off a roof.

I watched him askance as someone on the bandstand recited the bromides: bravery, honor, duty, sacrifice. He stood as erect as he could, weeping even more obviously.

Soon after that morning it was Micah’s guts that exploded. Gunfire didn’t kill him but booze did. And nowadays his namesake son, a veteran of the hideously ill-considered second Iraq invasion, is always plastered himself.

Should Micah somehow show up today, I swear I’d have better words for him, if only– minus the ironic adjectives– his name.

One More Eulogy

–in mem. Forrest Bartlett  (1936-2011)

I’d arrived a bit late, and the lot at the church had filled up. So I parked in a spot by the shady lawyer’s office, which was closed on a weekend afternoon.

By the time I ran in, the tributes had already started, rough and funny and tender all at once, just like the dead man himself. We heard words I suspect had never been heard in that sanctuary, and wouldn’t be heard again, but without them, none of us –over two hundred strong– would have found the hour right and true.

Our old friend was a jack-of-all-trades. He logged, he farmed, he did bodywork on cars, and whenever he could, he went hunting.  The reminiscences tended to dwell on all that. One of a dying breed: the phrase kept repeating itself, as if it had been invented for him. Nowadays the breed’s descendants have generally left the farm, but they haven’t found a better thing to take its place. Most live in trailers or shabby apartments, and the only hunting they do is for work, which has lately been scarce.

Even if I hadn’t watched some tough people cry that day, I’d have cried on my own, just as I’d have laughed even without hearing others’ laughter, or the jokes told aloud by an arty-looking woman about how she, a Vegan, for the love of God, could have loved him so.

Sure, he could get worked up, said his friend John the blacksmith. He might take a poke at you. But John reminded us as well that he’d be there if you called him for help with your cow or your wood or your heart. The dead man didn’t want preachers at his burial, so it was the blacksmith who spoke the eulogy, a word whose meaning, he admitted, he’d had to look up: “A formal speech in praise of someone who’s died.”

I wouldn’t have called John’s eulogy formal, merely perfect. Cow or wood or heart indeed. Furthermore, what it said was all true. Try making the same claim for that lawyer, for the politicians, for the smug professors.

 John ended the service with “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, partly because another of our late friend’s callings was that of cider-maker. As I say, he did more or less whatever he could do to get by.

Where I’d parked was not, after all, the lot for the shady lawyer but for the tenants who lived above the next-door laundromat. A tattooed woman with a basket of wet clothing, her voice rough with smoke, got all worked up because I’d taken her space. I don’t give a shit why you’re here, she snarled. My temper might easily have flared; yet all I could find to say was, I’m sorry. Jesus,I’m sorry.

                                                   1949

In the photograph, they’re both grinning straight at the Kodak, An elm, not blighted yet to death, at their backs.

It’s years since either parent was on hand. How did it happen? I’m just past 79.

We live our lives, Psalm 90 says, as a tale That is told. From where I stand, that’s all too real.

What startles me is that the tale’s so short, An instant, it seems, from this moment back to its start.

With what I’ve known, you’d think there’d be chapter on chapter: Five children, all those grandsons, those granddaughters.

And I could go on and on about each one. But on and on’s no longer what it’s been.

I have another photo on my dresser, My mother alone in that one, standing by water

That sluggishly slides by our cabin in Sumneytown. I don’t know how to explain why I can’t be found

In the shot. After all, the bucket at her feet Is full of sunfish I’ve plucked from that very creek.

Or is it? Like anyone else, I tell myself stories. Maybe my claim’s no more than imaginary,

Which makes it, for me at least, not a bit less true. The fish are green and orange. Their lips are blue.

I feel the heat that caroms off streamside boulders, I I can whiff the swamp nearby where algae molder.

Who dwells in our old house these days? Search me.
Whose room was mine? Who recalls the ghost elm tree?

The grass in the meadow’s likely gone brown as ever. No pumpkinseed in the pail still gasps or quivers.

Who visits the cabin? Who hooks small fish in the water? My mother stands there beaming beside my treasures.

I shouldn’t be, and yet somehow I’m stunned: Even the fish in that yellowed photo are young.