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Michael Shorb
Uncle Sterry
This old house off the road, aged
To a birch white and peeling
Like shingled skin, this mapled
Driveway
lost in autumnal hues
The round strength of upstate hills
Gathering straws of darkness,
Clay-stained leaves
running wild in antlered sun.
A strong man. But now,
His wife living in town
Nursing a broken ankle
The TV glows
blue parody of the burning bush
As we approach the door.
The homogenized babble of talking heads
Looms incongruous here in
Rockwell Country.
Any noise to fill the silence now.
Any mode of sleep.
Sterry welcomes us.
Walking, he sags over
Like a barn door missing two latches.
Arthritis and shingles bent what
Two wars and eighty years of working
Mornings couldn't budge.
There's no answer for the body's
Betrayal but a fumbled adjustment,
Resentment's a luxury.
He squints through thick glasses,
Moving them across his eyes
Like a man panning for gold,
As though one spot among those scars
Still saw as young soldier Paris-
Bound or middle-aged farmer
Mopping away sweat saw.
*
He is measured in the memories his wife's
Voice disappeared into like snow into
Rain, by how large the musty kitchen
Seems, bottles of Percodan
On the shelves, the trickling
stream behind the shed
Dammed into pond by a bumbling neighbor.
We talk of the madness of California weather.
"All the same son, day after day, like a neon tube.
Must confuse the animals. With animals
You need seasons.
Rain and snow.
The exact gold of October.
There's a time to rest the mare and a time
To foal. The same with sheep, and cows."
The only thing he regrets, says Uncle Sterry,
Is giving up his car because of cataracts.
That, and letting his delicate wife
Blanche sleep alone by the dining room
Heater the night she rose from troubled
Sleep and stepped through a closed glass
Door toward the warmth of relatives in town.
As evening wears on Uncle Sterry reveals
The ghosts and skeletons of apple butter
Country. The Irishman
crazy on debts and whiskey
Who bludgeoned two boys and a wife,
Burying them beneath flat rocks
In a field of stubbled corn.
"Or you take the Millers now. Stu and Aurelia?
She had that slight hunch back, you know.
Hadn't oughtta had no children, them two.
Six kids born and three was normal
three was dwarves.
Hadn't oughtta had no children."
*
The time to depart grows like a shadow.
We say goodbye to
Uncle Sterry,
shaking those burled hands
That once milked and sowed and
Stacked bales of hay in the course of the day.
I don't even know what I felt,
Driving back,
light beams cutting
The air like molten snow.
A loss.
Not sorrow exactly.
But cheated,
and a fear.
Copyright (c) Michael Shorb, 2005. All rights reserved.
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