Stephen S. Mills gently eulogizes his grandfather while at the same time reflecting on the distances that grow–perhaps inevitably–within families.
I’m Supposed to Start with the Last Time I Saw You
there on the couch in the small house
where you moved after selling the farm.
It was November in Indiana, and the brown
leaves were stretched across your yard
like a blanket. You spoke of the garage
where you still had plans to fix things up:
build shelves, organize nuts and bolts,
keep your hands busy. You never got up
the whole time I was there, even when
grandma took me to the basement, down
those rickety stairs. The ones my mom feared
you would fall down. Down where I got one
of grandma’s oil paintings: a picture of a boat
because I live in Florida now—too far away.
That was nearly two years ago, the last time
I saw you, which is where I think death poems
are supposed to begin. I wonder if I should
mention the fact that I never spoke to you again,
though I don’t want people to get the wrong idea,
to think something happened between us,
that I didn’t care, or had nothing to say,
because I did. But things get in the way—
like my irrational fear of the telephone,
all those miles between us, my lack of money,
your failing heath. So we didn’t speak in two years.
No, not once before I got the call that you were gone,
that old age and your heart had finally caught up
with you. Mom says in those last days you
hallucinated fixing a pick-up, re-wiring a house,
and I think what a nice way for you to go—
doing what you loved—not like the last time I saw
you with the fall light hanging in the windows.
And I know I’m not supposed to say that I don’t
remember the last words we spoke because
I’m a poet and remembering is what I do,
but I thought I’d see you again, thought there’d
be more time. There had been so many close calls
and somehow you always pulled through,
besides I was too focused on getting out
of the house, that little place I knew would be
the end of you. I felt if I stayed any longer
I wouldn’t be able to remember how you were
in the farmhouse where I spent the summers
of my youth breaking green beans from your garden,
riding that Radio Flyer red wagon down your hills
or running through your grape vines, climbing
your apple trees—but these are clichés,
though true, still a terrible place to start a poem
about death. Maybe I should’ve begun with you
reading one of my first short stories. An 11 year old
writing about soldiers fighting and dying in the Korean
War—and you, a World War II vet thinking I got it
right. Saying I captured something real, tangible,
and to this day, though the story was probably shit,
it is the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten on
my writing. Of course, you might like this poem too,
might see something true in it about the nature
of relationships, of a grandson to his grandfather,
but how does a poem like this end? Does it collapse
into tears? Fall apart at the seams? Does it take on
the timeless question of our own mortality? Or does
it end with another death: a funeral we both attended
for my cousin who died in a car accident? There
in the graveyard on a stone bench I saw you cry
for the first and only time. At 15, I watched you:
your head in your hands, hunched over, and small,
though not as small as the last time I saw you.
And now I suspect you are growing even smaller
up north beneath the ground where it is beginning
to grow cold, where the leaves are dying, shriveling up,
saying goodbye to the roots that once so firmly
held them to the ground.
-for Ralph Miller
***
Editor’s Note: This is not the first time Stephen S. Mills has published on The Good Men Project. Read his essay “When I Realized I’d Never Be Romeo.”
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