Inside his apartment
he’s lived again
lives of his family,
unintelligible kin,
whose faces matted
behind cheap glass look
almost blessed in this
half-life of pictures.
Great-grandfather,
whose wooden leg,
carved good, my father
told me, from Russian
birch, stands heroically
atop the television.
Before he sailed to
Canada, marauders
sacked his lumber mill.
Who’d guess one night
those trees would burst
and squall like black
snow, the fortune
wrecked?
Above the old one, my
grandparents look down.
Caught timidly in this
black & white, they
knew of death. He drank
too much, a politician
who sold his house for
dust and booze. And she,
Parkinson’s much worse,
then all the twitching
stopped.
Andy’s there,
the favorite son; in 1944,
the handsomest sailor
Lackawanna ever saw.
Back from war, locked
in his fever, in and out
of the Vets’ psychiatric
wing. (My father wept.)
I’m beside my brother,
beside his wife and kids
who wear bright clothes
of the bohemian ’70s.
Before us all, like
a worshiper, our father
sits, divorced, far
into decline.
Outside the fires
of Bethlehem burn,
black smoke rising
like the choked breath
of generations, this
human turning,
irretrievable.