Grandma & Me

Grandma & Me    
     
Treetops sway in the summer breeze    
Grandma leads me up the fire tower stairs    
To a place where Earth’s sorrows fade    
And the cardinal is perched beside the bluejay    
As they converse in foreign tongues    
That my child’s heart feels but does not comprehend    
Grandma smiles in silent reverie    
While we ascend into cloud dreams    
My little legs tire of the climb    
And we settle our ascent into something like rest    
But her smile is a conversation like the birds    
Yet in the maternal tongue of angels    
     
She is my mother from heaven    
Whose warm sunshine fills the chambers of my heart    
As birthdays come and go like chapters in a diary    
Where golden words flow from her love    
And settle like autumn leaves    
One night my fever grows like a wildfire    
While we abide in the lake house    
She sits beside me on the bed    
And places a cold rag on my forehead    
With a grin that assures my fire will subside    
     
As I enter the limbic years    
When youth submerges into troubles    
She knows little of    
Occult fears summoned by a friend    
That portend my soul’s demise    
She sits in a lotus pose    
On a mattress repository for her tears    
“Do you still love me?” she cries    
Grandpa’s words sink into my ears    
“Son, we love you but I can’t send your grandma to her grave.”    
     
Exile in a foreign city    
But loved by aunt and uncle    
Until her ocean of storms recedes    
And I return to the holy home    
Renewed into the peace that passeth all understanding    
A dream continued on the other side of the black hole    
In a cosmic loop of love’s redemption    
     
And the decade soars on the wings of her consolation    
Until I find myself in a college dormitory    
Grandparents come to bring me home    
But dogs playfully tussle    
On student union grounds    
Knocking grandma onto the concrete axiom    
Of compound fractures    
I gaze on like a spectator in shock    
At her bones sticking out of grape skin ages    
Fraught with the pain of my childhood    
And the pool of blood like a macabre pond    
Where sadness rolls through me like a cold front    
Of Arctic weather so strange in our tropic clime    
But her fall is not so deep    
As to silence words from her heart    
“John go to your class.”    
The faculty reaches out to me    
But the future is a cloudy horizon    
Dark as the dreams that follow my sleep    
Grandma’s laughter over the phone    
After metal pins planted    
“Oh John, I got myself in a mess.”    
Canines absolved    
     
Yet a year passes and her bones mend    
Complete healing from the oracle of doom    
We wander the streets past small cafes    
In a Spain even Hemingway never envisioned    
When war shook the earth like a mighty trumpet    
But our signs of good fortune    
Take us to Tangiers    
Where a snake embraces a woman    
But I follow Grandma like a lost lamb    
     
The years weave me in a dream catcher    
As the tears of adulthood pool at my feet    
And I can’t be twenty-one on this mountain    
Where golden mists gather around me    
Upon a magic carpet, I haggled for    
     
I fly off the sheer cliffs and settle    
On the hard ground of reality    
Where marriage takes me onto a distant shore    
Where even wifely love cannot follow    
   
Grandpa sits in the living room watching football  
Grandma hoping for a miracle cure  
For the cancer that eats away at him  
She stands on stool like Martha Graham  
Still limber enough in her eighties  
To stretch on one leg and reach the top  
Of cabinets where canned soups sleep  
     
Grandpa slips into the crack of forever    
She sits in her familiar bedroom chair    
Weeping like a lost child    
“It is so hard” she pleads for comfort    
Us alone in this house of memories    
“I know Grandma”    
“I know you know” her exasperation    
     
Grandma slips into a spell of fog    
Where Lethe washes the bad and good    
But certain memories linger    
She walks up to me in my indigo blues    
And touches my arm with a smile    
“John, what happened between you and Marsha?”    
My answer lost on the ripples of time    
Where birds sing on blue boughs    
To the tune of Satchmo    
From when she was a little girl    
Who lost her mother to Osiris    
In a childbirth gone wrong    
Awaiting reunion with her Mom    
On the banks of Styx