It’s there in some photos of us
in an album he seems in the last months
to have fiddled with; it now lays
flat on a very old and wobbly table.
Some caption –
I actually checked it.
From memory it seemed
“a good son, a good father,”
and this turned out to be correct,
however I’d forgotten the phrase I now see
is from of all people Leigh Hunt –
a half-line from “Abou
Ben Adhem”:
May his tribe increase!
Withal the funeral and that at the house
so many men of my father’s
generation said
fond things for which only my ear
seemed to quarry the lore – each man
himself since passed, as though that day were
to have ushered them, from a public scrum, out –
as the old men said goodbye
my cell-phone announced a high school chum, Mags,
as he announced his visit ; we hadn’t spoken in ten years.
So that he seems to have emerged from a gracious phrase
that had no reason other than who he was
to have loved my father. On a wrought-iron
front porch bench he wanted me to speak
of the months it took my father to die.
I don’t recall what I said, but only the thought my mother
might be similarly pinned down
on the other side of our dining room window.
All I could offer Mags was to ask after an ancient injury to his neck:
When we were sixteen my father gave me a car;
wanting to show it off, I proposed picking up Mags for tennis.
When I did, Mags asked, Can this thing talk to you?
Accelerating to the bait, the car flipped twice on a
bend by the time it hit sixty.
Two trees later, a turtle on its shell ten feet from
his neighbor’s bay window, Mags squeezed himself
from the week old car’s rolled down window. His neck
needed several consultations before his family decided not to sue.
Some back problems came of it,
he admitted, not enough
to keep him from running marathons, one for which,
as always, he was presently training.
Twice married, divorced twice, of a third lover
one child now herself a late teen, Mags
enjoyed a late afternoon with me, I don’t know why.
Jeff Hamilton lives in St. Louis and teaches at Washington University.
*Photo courtesy of ortizmj12.