Don’t write about your grandparents,
say the poet pundits. They complain.
Which means I can’t describe my grandmother
lying there on the flowered davenport
in perpetual grief, a crocheted afghan
over her long dress, her skinny legs,
her sad black shoes,
her oldest girl dead of a fever at twelve,
the girl “as beautiful as the morning”
said my grandfather, who didn’t talk that way,
and then their only son killed in the war,
his young man’s smile wide as the Pacific.
I still have my grandmother’s desk,
the lion feet, the many drawers.
I can run a fingernail into the corners
of each little drawer – not a crumb
of happiness there.
Don’t write about your grandparents.
So I won’t.
I can tell you I am almost as old
as those distant grandparents,
that I am lying on a davenport to write this,
but we call it a couch. That this morning
I took off my white nightgown
and studied myself in the long mirror
where I saw a body that still moves easily
and looks like a woman. The hair,
both public and pubic, going white.
So tell me, sweet reader, is that
an acceptable thing to write?
