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--in memory of one who is not gone
Once in a jerky student movie I saw him showered
by apple blossoms in a graveyard, petals crowning
his gleaming pate. Flower and skull, we got it,
having seen pages and pages of this sort of showering.
Then the camera slipped an instant to reveal
how he shook the bounty from above on himself,
one hand gripping the bough tight as a pen,
raining dire blessings on that implicated head.
No doubt the shoestring budget allowed
no apple bough shaker. Cheerful to a fault,
he consented to dump fragrant symbols on himself.
Oh, too tempting not to take this up now
as summary of a career in lyric play,
tensile flex of green branch and heavy hand,
the given arc between stolid earth and vanishing sky
seeded with that praise he nonetheless deserves
for his handful of perfect fruit. A quarter century’s gone,
his books long since ceased. He’s begun to slip
from most of the anthologies by now, though from time
to time he is still hauled out of the Home
to recite those ancient miracles of his prime.
I saw him arrive at the hall, grandchild steering him
like a battleship into dry dock. Pipe ashes
all over his tweed, stubble on his still lyric face.
Nobody could say why he clutched three cheap flashlights
all unlit, a plastic jumble filling his writing hand.
So after receiving my teacher’s blank-eyed greeting, I asked,
half expecting some quip as of old about Diogenes,
or the light that surpasseth understanding.
“Oh, it’s just a habit, I guess,” he smiled, and shuffled on,
uninsulted, heading for the podium where he would read
his best poem four times before they eased him off the stage.
© 1998, David Graham
(first published in Issue 5 of The Cortland Review,
text & audio with 4 other poems by David Graham)
David Graham is the author of six collections of poems, including Second Wind (Texas Tech) and, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume Press); with Kate Sontag he is co-editor of the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press). He teaches English at Ripon College.
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