Inspo Obituaries
The year before he died, my father
would send them to me, casually,
the way one might pass
along a recipe, little strips
of newsprint snipped from his local paper
and slipped in an envelope,
or else hyperlinks
copied from a funeral home’s website
and pasted into the body
of an email. Sometimes
he would add a note like: To the point
or Sounds too old, other times
he would just underline
or put an asterisk beside
passages he found compelling.
Generally, I’d skim them,
then tuck them away,
not wanting to hasten things along
by lingering over the deceased.
But when he finally succumbed,
and it was time for me
to summarize who he was
in one to two concise paragraphs,
I thought of Robert (Bob)
who was an avid bowler,
and Maurice (“Mo”) known for
his quick wit and dry sense of humor.
I recalled Dolores B. who served
on the township water board,
and her husband Tony who went
by “Poppy” and made his own wine.
I summoned Kathleen and Frank,
Irma and Dale, all the friends
and co-workers, neighbors
and acquaintances, who crossed
over before he did; then, with all
of them gathered around me,
added his name to theirs.
Old Suits
Invariably, you find them
crouching in the back of thrift stores,
huddled in tight rows like those
grainy black and white photos
of the unemployed waiting in breadlines
during the Depression. Often,
there are navy worsteds and charcoal
flannels, tweed herringbones
and khaki poplins, polyester
leisure suits and all-black gabardines,
jackets and slacks who for decades
strutted their stuff at the office
or in the swank interiors of cocktail bars,
who sat through sunny commencements
and rain-soaked funerals, who
attended church, freshly dry-cleaned,
every Easter, but mostly just loafed
in closets, pressed up against
the silk blouses and slim pencil skirts
of their wives. Never in a million
years did they imagine they’d end
up here; discarded, alone, crammed
onto a cold rack beneath the glare
of fluorescent lights, their shoulders
slumped, the knees of their pantlegs
drawn tight to their once-proud chests.
Rusty
It’s what my father was always
claiming to be, like an old Ford pick-up
used for plowing snow,
or that funnel-clad woodsman
left out in the rain in the Wizard of Oz.
Anytime he sliced a golf ball
into a nearby pond, or failed
to replicate my granny shot
in a game of H-O-R-S-E,
or let my knight fork his rook
and queen, he would simply say:
Hmm, must be getting rusty, fixing
the blame on that thin scab of decay
that chronically gnaws at our skills.
And he extended that same grace
to me, dismissing the time I bowled
six straight frames of gutter balls,
or forgot an entire semester’s worth
of trigonometry, or repeatedly
ground the gears of his stick shift
while driving him home from the hospital
as just a fine layer of rust,
something easily brushed aside.
Last year, after he died, I wrote
a poem about him almost
every morning. But it’s been a while
since then, and I’m trying to remember
how to do it.
That
My father was a fan of it.
I mean that, that demonstrative
determiner, frequently deploying
it to create a sense of distance
between himself and the person
he was speaking of, as in
that mother of yours — this
was soon after their divorce —
is like a vacuum cleaner,
always sucking up my money.
Or that Carolyn — his sister —
all she wants to do is talk politics
at Thanksgiving. Then there
was his cast of neighbors:
that Irma, that Howard, that Tom,
always committing some sort
of minor infraction like
parking in front of his mailbox
or letting their dog go in his
yard. And I sometimes wonder
what he had to say about
that son of his, the one who
majored in chemistry but
shunned the lab to write poems
instead. Perhaps if it weren’t
for that cancer, I’d have asked
him. Although given how
close they were — him and that
tumor — the grammarian in me
says it really ought to have been
this cancer.
