And a draft poem. See what ya think.
I had not quite abandoned the house to insects
and their dark dreams of six-legged gods
when I went swimming through the pine dust
of the darkly baked attic where my grandmother
had stacked the games and toys
that had taken me from the Saturday afternoons
when rain turned the deep pocket
of her backyard into a wallow none of the cousins
was allowed to belly slide through
while our mothers percolated more coffee,
debated the use of sugar in their lives, worked
to gain their mother’s affection
while we played hide-and-go-seek
in the basement with its cold water smell,
built in mysteries and red paint
that rusted our white sweat-socks as we ran
and slid while our fathers—none of them
related to each other—shifted their guts
around the dangerous chemicals and grass clippings
of the garage and kept long silences
to themselves, wondering about the bodies
each of the others had married into their beds
and the stories that trailed those bodies
and the women’s children now opening worn toys
the wives abandoned long ago, toys that grandmother
talked one of the men into shoving into the attic
when the last of my cousins completed high school
and most of them settled into slow, erratic orbits
around the bay window of the low house.
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