AT THE STATIONERS
Wearing a blue-and-white striped apron, meaty hands resting
on hips, Mrs. Bernstein was as close to a babushka
as suburban Queens got. She stood guard at a freezer
filled with ice cream cups and wooden spoons whose aftertaste
stayed way past the frozen flavor. She surveilled boys
surveying the rows of plastic models in boxes
layered with dust that disbursed into a million motes when moved.
At the other end of the corner building, dimly lit
by flickering fluorescent tubes, cluttered
corridors of shelves sat, spilling with sundries: yellow tubes
of airplane glue, boxes of Crayolas, and marbled
notebooks that ended in a wood-and-glass counter
filled with rows of Turkish taffy, paper-wrapped squares
of Bazooka bubble gum, wax lips, and Pez dispensers.
Her husband stands, his pear of a body in grey trousers;
strands of hair crossing his balding head. He’d chew his cigar,
eternally unlit, while his look disdained the row of bikes
propped against his storefront window. Then, scowling
at the kids from the school up the street who leafed through
dime comics, he’d bark his ever-reliable mantra:
“Come on, come on! This ain’t no library.”
DRYDOCKS AND PARADES
The warm breezes
of great heights
ran through fine
light hair
as I straddled
my father’s neck,
gripping tight to
his collar
as veterans
marched proudly by:
Ike’s years then.
Days of wonderful
dizziness,
looking at
that parade of men
below me:
a fearful
pleasure—like now,
climbing kingposts
and stanchions
of
eighty-thousand-ton tankers
built with
half-inch steel
and starplate from
the keel up —
using cables,
rivets, bolts,
torches, and welds.
GRANDFATHER: LEMUEL GURNEY
Born, maybe in
1889; likely ’88;
don’t bother with
the day or month.
Passing before I
turned three,
I can’t conjure
his face, but my shoulders
recall calloused
hands that cradled me,
his palms infused
by the smell of earth.
My mother
descended from English courtiers,
but her father
hailed from Maine, where
he grew as hard as
its granite cliffs,
logging in the
White Mountains. Then he moved
to Vermont to
build his home in Searsburg,
across from
Camel’s Hump, high in the Green Mountains
that looked down
on Bennington. He constructed a cabin
with tools he
made. I knew my grandfather’s brother.
He taught me about
long guns, showing me
to cradle the
wooden stock in the small of my shoulder.
“Breathe steady.
Hold it. Exhale slow when ready.
Squeeze, don’t
pull.” My great uncle spoke of his brother,
a man whose life
blended into nature,
a man hunting
squirrels when doctors
ordered him to bed
rest after surgery,
a man who
slathered his arm with maple sap
to attract bees
and prove a point: “See?”
he’d growl. “They don’t attack, only defend.”
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