Wednesday 7 September 2016

Relic Environments Trilogy: Book II, Part 2.v

from Book II, Part 2, An Almanac of Deeper Dreams

A Month in the Country

Fifty years a country doctor,
Grandfather began with buggy rounds,
and died the year the H-Bomb
vaporised its first atoll.

He knew a sugar pill and company
could cure the hypochondriac old ladies, starved
for talk on lonely farms –
for others, called cancer what it was,
delivered half of Mason County’s babies, or
knelt in autumn fields
to saw the leg the thresher
only half took.

Even Grandma called him Dr Pollock.

*
Late ‘41, a fortnight after ‘Pearl’
my Father volunteers, makes Sergeant in the Signals,
between basic there and shipping-out,
the telegram to Grandma with the news,
BESS AND ME MARRIED TODAY TAMPA STOP MY UNIT
NOW ON MOVE TO (censored) STOP
BESS ON KENTUCKY TRAIN TO YOU FOR WAR STOP

… four years hoeing Grandma’s garden – the corn
grown seed-to-shuck, months
between the letters back from ‘Billy’.

*
My sister and I were a month at the old place,
summer 1955, the chores unchanged, the beanpole’s shadow
still long across the rows, the salt crust of smokehouse hams
as bitter, or from the well’s cool depth,
memory…

*
Others, too, passing…

*
This wedding ring was hers, inscribed from Billy
the middle of last century, then
in widowhood to me, its repair
made so,
just here, to bridge the space her swollen joints demanded,
yet, the names and wedding date
now part obscured, a broken orbit
round the empty ‘O’.

In my hand, a month in mind, a dynamic of memory
dutiful in the jeweller’s weld,
lost time polished to a seamless fit.

*
Seasons are lent, the trellis of roses
sheltering the view to the cemetery lane.

Climbing through another summer, those
bright reds were Mother’s favourites, as here,
circling and circling, this hallmark
binding flesh.


Codicil

McDill Field, Tampa, Florida, March 5, 1942

Dear Aunt Maud I got your letter today. The candy was fine. And the tobacco, from Daddy I reckon. I wish you could be here to enjoy this good weather. When the war is over and if I get back I will make my home here. Bess has never been to Florida. She is coming down the first weekend in April and stay a week. We’ll get married then maybe. She sure is a funny girl. She cries sometimes. Like when I call her up sometimes she cries. She reminds me of you, she is so quiet and gentle. I had a gang of 25 men working the line this afternoon. The Lieut. don’t know anything but what he reads in a book. You have to have done a thing before to understand how to do it. Such a bunch of bone headed Yankees I never did see. Tell Mother to open my bag before my clothes rot. Edwin can have anything I got if he wants to. The flowers are pretty in town now. We get plenty to eat, and no grit in the food much.

Will write soon,

Billy

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