Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks. . .
—T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes
Your father left this place a mess,
we certainly agree on that,
but I wonder if all our cleaning
and fixing up are really part
of readying the house for sale
or just some way of passing time,
something a father and son might do,
like playing catch,
and over which you’d have us linger,
as at your mother’s, then
your father’s grave you
lingered, as I shall at yours,
or you at mine.
The work goes slowly,
deliberately. We find jobs that don’t
need doing, and we do them—
reglaze the windows, scrub down
the kitchen cabinets—although
both of us know that one day more
is one day less. Last Saturday
I climbed into the attic, dark and grimy
as any shut and boarded mine,
in which we chanced upon your childhood,
or that part of it you didn’t carry with you
into your next life, where we
became acquainted, while dust and damp
had their way with your toys,
with boxes of grade-school papers,
with a violin (unstrung, unbridged,
unbowed) that has not been played
since you were young, that has not sung
since you were a boy and sang.
For I cannot recall having ever
heard you sing. Even in church
when I was small and stood beside you,
the hymnal open between us, you
seemed only to mouth the words
that spoke of the things that last,
of faith and hope and love—and love
the greatest of the three.
Not that you did not, do not love me,
but that you did not, do not say so,
as I have not, although I grope toward
what I cannot say—here, now—as
Saturday, my knees straddling two
two-by-fours, I reached for boxes
just beyond my reach in your father’s attic,
as I will reach perhaps for others
in your own attic’s darkness.
But what concerns me now is what might seem
the least significant thing we found,
which even you, who want to keep everything
found in that house and cart it back to yours,
might readily have tossed away—a crumpled
bit of wrapping paper with a tag that read
“To Gene with love from Mother, Christmas, 1939.”
Brought down into the half-light
of your bedroom, the paper was dingy
as last week’s snow, in which
not even the most playful children
any longer wish to play, their snowmen
languishing in backyards where they melt a little
each afternoon, the angels they laid down to make
by flapping their cold, wet arms and legs
now indistinct depressions in the snow
across which they walk regardless
on the way to school.
Over fifty years ago
this piece of paper must have fallen to the floor
like one small flake in the blizzard
of a Christmas morning, perhaps melting
from your mind’s green field even as it landed
and you turned to inspect what had lain concealed
beneath it through breakfast
and the long, sleepless night before.
Perhaps the package held socks or a sweater,
something warm and useful, or perhaps
one of these toys or books we just discovered
buried in the dark above us—
Pecos Bill and the Cattle Rustlers
or the Hardy Boys; a cardboard horse-race game,
or a kit for making soldiers of all nations
(complete with paints and copious directions)
to be gunned down indiscriminately
by a cannon that fired corks.
Whatever it was the package held,
as you bent over it in real or feigned delight,
your mother gathered up this wrapping—
and not because it was glamorously festive
in a store-bought way, or large enough
to save and use again. No, it was plain,
once-white tissue paper, the gift wrap
not of the poor, who use the Sunday funnies,
but of the frugal possibly, which your mother
was—the way she pinched and saved,
earning money selling Watkins Products
door-to-door. But this is not right either.
Your family was not tight-fisted
when it came to you, for you can recall
an annual small avalanche. And besides,
economy does not explain why the paper was kept.
But perhaps this is all wrong, and it was you
who found the paper as wonderful
as what it held, and who folded away
this scrap of the past to be found,
crumpled and yellowed, in dust and darkness.
But that morning the tissue was an expanse
white and pure as the neighborhood
beyond your bedroom window, where the storm
of a child’s Christmas wish had blown into being
a deep new world that one might populate
as one chose with men or angels, in which
one might act out with snowballs or cap pistols
the adventure of Pecos Bill or the Hardy Boys—
a world, like this page, of possibilities,
like this soiled tissue across which
your mother left a sky of red and green
and silver stars, the kind teachers use
to reward those who stay within the lines,
to applaud children who know
all the state capitals, or the difference
between “principle” and “principal,”
or who can find all the prepositions
on a page of simple declarations.
Saturday, when you tried to explain again
why you no longer celebrate Christmas,
how your religion forbids it, I tried
to listen to your reasons, which made
the sort of sense such reasons do.
Well, yes, I said, and, Well, yes . . .
And I understand that everyone at least
pretends to understand. I know I do.
Pretend, that is. Yet today
I would ask you to look again
at this dusty, snowy field, this
constellated sky, this modest,
fragile souvenir upon which,
amid the still-bright gummed stars,
is affixed a tag across which a hand
has written, “For Gene with love
from Mother”—three simple
prepositional phrases, as you
would have known, even then,
as these bundles of homework papers
tucked among grade-school valentines
and works of art still tell us
(I see you were good at grammar,
though I confess some satisfaction
at learning you were not perfect, then).
“For Gene with love from Mother”—
is there anything else we long so much
to hear, that can do more to redeem
the time in which we clean house
and reglaze windows, play and grieve,
between our births and deaths?
It is as though for just a moment
we can hear your mother speaking to you again
across a distance vast as those
that separate the stars from one another,
a distance great as that which stands
between the heavens deep as a field
of fallen snow and us knee-deep
in boxes here below.