Published Fall 2006
 
A Photo of My Grandfather
I try to tidy my mother's kitchen,
but he won't quit staring
through the picture frame in her room:
buttoned up in army formals,
his shoulders stiff
like a boy's before prom.
He's going to war.
Korea? World War II? I don't know,
but I have to shut the door
or I'll never clear my head of him:
storming the beach at Normandy,
all the corpses going soft
like forgotten avocados.
As soon as the latch clicks
and I get back to scrubbing the faucet,
my grandfather climbs through the picture frame
like Lazarus or a B-movie zombie,
drenching the room in cigarette smoke,
rummaging through the dresser. He grumbles
about shrapnel in his chest, and how
if he survived he would've
taught himself to play guitar
backwards, and better than Hendrix.
But it's all a lie. He wasn't at Normandy
or even Kapyong, just some humble trench
outside an unpronounceable town.
And it's easy to imagine he died there
though he didn't; the way it's better
to remember the honeymoon
than the decades of ho-hum lays. Oh
but let's throw it all out: our fathers
and their big guns cocked at their hips.
Here's the real photo album
of Grampa tooling around the house,
hauling in the trash bins and bitching about work.
And here's how he really died: too poor
for insurance, passed out on the sofa
with a cigarette. He woke up just in time
to rescue the furniture, but didn't make it:
running back to the blaze where he fainted,
an old asthmatic hefting his recliner
the way a young girl, high on adrenaline,
can lift the wrecked car from her mother's leg.
So in the last untaken photo, Grandma
stands outside, one hand on the salvaged TV,
the way she might have stood with my mother
an imagined lifetime ago, the good wife waiting
for the last train home from the war.
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