For My Uncle on Mothers Day
Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2011 10:08 pm
For My Uncle on Mothers Day
The bones down his back
feel like stones. They remind me
of throwing rocks into
the beaver pond. “To make it skip,
you need them flat,” he'd said.
I didn’t care if they skipped,
liked the round ones better.
Round like his vertebrae.
Round with some weight felt
better in the hand,
felt better to throw.
He was so big in those days,
the days of learning how rocks sink.
I’d follow him through the swamp looking
for trilliums or fiddle heads,
killing time on a hot summers day.
There were railroad tracks, wild flowers
and glass bottles - we were explorers
of the cattails and pussy-willows.
Once we found the skull of a bovine,
it’s horns pointing up through dried muck,
(no body – no reason for it to be there)*
it just was and so we left it to the
quiet whispers of the trees and the
splash of a frog entering the pond.
I tighten my embrace.
The bones down my uncle’s back
a line of stones.
*(I think that line is coming out)
The bones down his back
feel like stones. They remind me
of throwing rocks into
the beaver pond. “To make it skip,
you need them flat,” he'd said.
I didn’t care if they skipped,
liked the round ones better.
Round like his vertebrae.
Round with some weight felt
better in the hand,
felt better to throw.
He was so big in those days,
the days of learning how rocks sink.
I’d follow him through the swamp looking
for trilliums or fiddle heads,
killing time on a hot summers day.
There were railroad tracks, wild flowers
and glass bottles - we were explorers
of the cattails and pussy-willows.
Once we found the skull of a bovine,
it’s horns pointing up through dried muck,
(no body – no reason for it to be there)*
it just was and so we left it to the
quiet whispers of the trees and the
splash of a frog entering the pond.
I tighten my embrace.
The bones down my uncle’s back
a line of stones.
*(I think that line is coming out)
