Green Linden Press

The Mansion at Elmodel

So I have to finish the life
I wanted to save:

aiming the brick-edge
at the chameleon 

in the threshold 
as it writhes, having

slammed its body
in the door limb

as I was trying to shoo
it outside before turning 

the cabin lock for the season.
We learn not

by being hurt 
ourselves but

by hurting 
something smaller. 

My father shot
a mockingbird—

his grandfather’s favorite—
and was sent out back 

to the thorn bush
to cut his own switch.

*

The voice
in the hotel hallway

is the voice
of your father,

murmuring.
You go with him 

to hear the Messiah
at Albert Hall.

He coughs, opening 
the miniature

bottle of whiskey
he swiped 

from first class.
The cough lasts 

for years.
At the end of the last

cantata, the trumpeter
bungles the trill.

These swift,
strangled sounds—

what you remember
best. On the train

later, your father
covers his face

with the smashed fedora
as he always does

on family trips.
Now it's just

the two of you 
and you can't

ever tell if he's
asleep or awake. 

*

My father saw himself
as a survivor 

of other people’s
wrecked lives. 

He tried to
be good above all else,

signed right up
for the draft, 

felt guilty
for just being alive,

a grim stance
inherited from his own father,

who hid under
the dead bodies

of his friends
in the snow of Belgium,

1943, Germans
bayoneting anything

that moved.
So many who didn't 

get half a chance—
My father's friend John 

who came back 
from Vietnam,

blew off his own face,
and lived for 40 more years

in the hospital bed 
in Milledgeville. 

Or his cousin
who every day as a boy 

listened
to the whistle

of same train that
killed his father

and grandfather
in an early morning

stall-out on the tracks.
So my father buried himself

in case studies 
of people who needed help—

the law his sword 
and avenger.

I think of these 
and other innocents

in a thicket of cypress
and pine where I had

my first kiss,
and where my teacher

Mr. Wilder shot himself
after boys 

with failing grades
accused him

of inappropriate
affection. 

*

You used to see
your poems

as altars, effigies,
little

shrines. Sorrow
needs a place

to sit down.
But that all seems so

old-fashioned 
now.

*

My brother comes back
from Princeton

talking about a scholar 
from the endless

suburbs of Atlanta
who is writing a book

called The End
of Southern History.

At twilight, we throw
around a tennis ball

in our front yard—
sister to father to brother,

recounting the ways
and times my father

almost died: cave-in, 
boot-camp grenade, the dealer’s

two-hundred dollar bounty
for the head of Lawyer Black. 

Is it any wonder I came by
a sense of personal drama.

*

When he could
walk, your father’s

solace was
an eighteenth-century

schooner trip
around the coast

of Maine.
His only vacation

from the practice
in years. He said

the sea looked
like a painting

finished
by the light

of the moon—
the series

of bone white
waves distinct

as vertebrae.
You were taking

an art history class
on Winslow Homer

at the time,
and your professor

brought each of you
a stone from

the beach next to
Homer’s studio.

This appealed
to your sense

of the authentic,
comforted you 

during one of the break-ups 
of those years.

As did the sound 
of the slides

slipping into
the projector's lit 

cylinder,
the machine’s

quiet motor and
low-wattage

glow. The art class 
an incubator

where you spent
three hours a week

not thinking
about the all the people

you’d out-grown 
or lost.

*

We are born
at least

from the passion 
of our fathers.

This month 
your two hundred 

seventy-sixth
egg

slips 
and bursts.

*

You are appointed
to go through

your father’s desk.
Ostensibly,

they need
the space

at the office, but
everyone knows that

he is never going
back to work.

Black and white
photographs,

his ROTC insignia, 
Creek pot shards,

useless address labels 
from two houses back,

an empty brown glass
medicine bottle

labeled “penicillin.”
Nothing interesting.

Going through his things, 
it feels like he is dead

rather than
across town 

struggling
at rehab to slide

his left foot
across a greased floor. 

*

Static crackles
behind his body

as he eases out
of the Buick’s

leather seat—always
from the passenger

side now. When he falls
forward from

the hydraulic chair
in the YMCA pool

and swims,
fin-like waves

follow after him.
He tries to

hide his body
from me

as I help him
get dressed,

but I see his
uneven shoulder

blades; the sores
from the brace—

raw skin
to bandage—

begin to look
like glyphs

to decode 
or the breaking 

through
of wings—

how trite 
your daydreams. 

*

Your father’s stroke
arrives

while he sits
in his office,

working on
social security

and worker’s
compensation cases.

He’d gone home
earlier to try

to sleep away
a bad headache,

but your mother
was sewing

in the bedroom,
and exiled him

back to the office.
After the fall, one

of his secretaries
gets him outside

on the lawn in a plastic
chair, holds

an umbrella 
over his head

as they wait
for the ambulance.

The EMTs that arrive
to save his life

are mostly 
moonlighting

firemen
he'd represented

in a huge discrimination 
case.

*

Let us assume
that the spirit

does indeed rise,
and will issue

from my father
in bed with

his rosaries, 
his body always

bruised, his left
side paralyzed,

his dreams
of brotherhood

undone. Will
the spirit half

drag the dead half
higher up?

*

You have driven
your father out

to the hunting cabin
his buddies fixed up

after his life
foundered,

the episode
during which

he crossed
over into death

and came back—
Like I was walking

backwards into a pit,
he said.

You close the cabin up
for the season

and drive back
through Elmodel,

so he can photograph
the old columned-

house there, built
to look antebellum

in the 1890s.
Never painted,

now rotting
from a hundred years

of humidity.
It reminds you 

of Diego Rivera's charcoal
of his hometown,

a series of bedsteads
sinking in lava.

A woman appears
from the side yard

in a pale housedress
like something straight out 

of Flannery O’Connor,
drawling through

cracked teeth
and the clump

of tobacco
in her cheek,

You’d best be
getting outta here.

Move on along, 
you got no right.