| Because he could not speak to lie or think
of truth
beyond his hands that groped the buckle and slipped
it free, because he never drank except in youth and loss,
and because history sips souls like trains eat horizon: boldly,
briefly, with a taste for surprise and junctions we cross,
but mostly because all our great lies are also great lines
–
which is not to say his death was mistold, but lined
with falsehood – my grandmother parted from truth
out of panic, swiftly crossing
herself with recrafting, so when those words slipped
from her mouth it was bold
in the manner of shield heaved to sword: not gain nor loss
to be found in the act, but evasion to tell them, I lost
my husband in the flu epidemic. And as her loss was
her line's
and her word all they had, my father, the eldest, took up
the bold
telling and said it aloud until the sounds lost their meaning
and the truth
of his death was an age not an instant, the point slipped
from its moment and into the smear of crosses
that marked the sick lawn behind the church. His cross
was the same as the others, the true tale of his loss
kept and buried beside him.
Grandmother,
guardian, slippery
parent to false generations, forgive me these lines,
absolve, if you can, my search for false truths.
In newspapers you hid and records you couldn't, what seems
bold
I have found to be trapped up in fear, this fear written
boldly
like headlines in black: how he lost an election and too scared
to cross
back to the farm with word that he'd risked it and lost,
sought the truth
of forgetting in the warm brown of bottles till his senses
were lost
and the sheriff he knew laid him down for the night in the
line
of cells. Then flat thwack of leather as he hauled off his
belt and slipped
it over the pipe, the chair kicked away and the faint slip
of air puffing outward, hands fixed to sides through the final
bold
swimming of strokes through his limbs. It was 1914 and the
line
outside heaven was heaving with souls, most helplessly crossed
by disease and thus first. So you did what you could with
the truth
that you had, and, laying your sin over his, turned the loss
to a lie so pure it is still almost nothing, crossed that
line
boldly, and as for the loss that was yours, his and ours,
you both
slipped through like the lover and beloved, like surprise
and the truth.
|
