(m)Oral History
My grandfather slept, woke, lived
on a slab of metal
tossed around by Pacific waves.
One small gun,
he manned it for long stretches through the night
listening, watching, knowing how little he could do -
Ready to do it.
Beleaguered by Japs (as they called them,
and he called them to his dying day)
sunburned, hungry -
three months late to port, chalked up as another Liberty ship lost -
he lived on canned peaches and bologna,
cigarettes and beer.
He wouldn’t touch them when he got home,
except the beer.
It was those things he told me about.
He never mentioned fear,
never mentioned killing or hating,
only said, “Boy, those Japs were some fighters. I don’t know
what made them do it, but they sure knew how to fight.”
It was in the cigar box full of coins that he took out when I visited,
hoarded from every port,
the pouch full of shells, the leather wallet with the Sphinx embossed on it,
the tattered blue manual, the way he made his bed and checked for bugs -
the seeds of a hundred lessons in obedience and courage,
tidiness and thriftiness and counting your blessings.
He hated the sea, but he took us to the shore.
He was smiling, but his eyes were fixed on the sand.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2008
Iterations
Bee stutters still on the side of the driveway
I set out a curled leaf with a sip of water.
I gather clover and loosestrife but she won’t drink their syrup
Gnarly and sticky in the grass under the big tree,
a naked, thing with thin bones and short, hopeless breaths.
I will keep it in a cardboard box.
I will feed it worms. I will drip water into its gaping beak.
Too young to be free of its egg, knocked from its nest, rejected
by its mother. It will die, and best not slowly.
My father will not tell me where he put the corpse
When she hoists herself up, she leaves a puddle of urine.
Her tail sneaks between soggy legs. She will not meet our eyes.
She exhausts herself trying to follow us from room to room.
She whimpers at being alone in the space of waiting
between life that’s over and death not begun.
Soft licks from her long tongue and steady beat
of her tail, of her still-sturdy heart,
weight of her calloused paw.
Nobody but the vet can bear to hold her,
hold her gaze until her eyes shut.
They are still open, ghostly blue-gray
cataract-blinded, gazing into mine.
He smells like mortuary chemicals
long before he goes into the ground. Dialysis
is when they take out all his fluids
and put them all back in again.
To fix his heart, they open him up and sew him back together,
don’t even bother to make him look natural
like they will once he’s slated for a pine box instead of back to bed.
His legs thrash in the covers; his soul is in the garage,
in his tools, which he’s too weak to use. Perhaps it is still there,
making heaven in the shavings and turp and glittering chisels.
He slept. My mother saw to that,
with drops of morphine and more drops and more and more
until he did little else but sleep.
His skin burned and then cooled.
His breathing rasped.
The dog left his side, began to pace and whimper.
9 hours later (he never woke)
pebbles in cardboard sound from his chest -
he emptied and it was done.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2006
Grandpa
The garage – dim, smell of shavings and turpentine.
Dull green workpants, pencil stub
behind your ear, poking out from luminous silver hairs
that never lay down smooth.
The rich, greasy cloud of smoke from your well-chewed cigar -
my first whiff of incense.
You prodded the fire with a stick of kindling wood
to make it laugh sparks of bronze and indigo.
The laws of physics set down
in the gleam of your hammer inscribing quick arcs in the air,
translating arcane maths to sink the nail.
Tender with an axe handle or sanding block as with a granddaughter’s hand,
turning her first birdfeeder over and over to examine
the inept joinings, nails splayed across wood instead of through -
and setting it out, filling it with pancake crumbs every morning
until it rotted through
sometime her freshman year.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2003
