Her Life Is On This Table and Other Poems Read online

Her Life is on This Table

  and Other Poems

  by Daniel Daugherty

  Copyright 2013 Daniel Daugherty

  Cover and photos by Daniel Daugherty

  For permission to quote from or reprint any poems in the book, contact the author at [email protected]. I am easy going about this, as long as proper attribution is made.

  Table of Contents

  Storm Change

  Her Life is on This Table

  The Dust Bowl

  First Love, Only Love

  Maybe Schrodinger’s Cat Has the Name

  The Dwarf’s Tale

  Countering Oblivion

  Part 1

  Part 2

  The Chalk Artists

  The Wind

  The Creator

  Girls’ Curls

  Boys’ Toys

  Circles

  Mine Enemy Sleep

  A Day in a Bottle

  The Quiet Place

  After the Fire

  Writing a Poem

  Gnat Theology

  Old Ben Cline

  A Meeting in the Woods

  After the Storm

  About the Author

  Storm Change

  Thrummed like tattered flapping sail

  By storm winds, in and through me

  Flung from these miasmic seas

  From sickness clinging to me

  Leeward blown, the carrion birds

  To peck at other eyes

  My very soul — it’s torn away!

  And loosed into the skies

  Driven through baptismal spray

  My cloak now ripped aside

  Defenseless, emptied, spent I stand

  With nothing left to hide

  And in this state, against cold fate

  As dark seas stretch from sight

  A newborn beast, I’m turning east

  To face the trial of light

  August 14, 2013

  Her Life is on This Table

  I've put her things on this table here.

  Her souvenirs.

  She kept them all in a glass case—

  it’s on its way to Goodwill now.

  If you’d like one, please take it.

  Otherwise, well,

  you know the Sunny Acres’ policy:

  offer belongings first to the family,

  then to those here at the home,

  and the rest of them off to Goodwill.

  Her son was here for the funeral,

  with his wife and daughter and grandkids,

  and I asked him about his mother’s mementos.

  “I’ll pack them up for you,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Those are her memories, not mine.”

  No, not the pewter Viking ship.

  That one I’m putting aside for Consuela.

  She wants it for her little boy.

  But anything else, take your pick.

  Those two ceramic cups, perhaps,

  painted with old men in funny clothes—

  like Russian peasants, I’m thinking.

  Imagine her going there!

  I had to help her into the bathroom

  and into her wheelchair to go in to lunch.

  Her poor back was curved like the Saint Louis Arch.

  When she stood, she was always bent over,

  looking down at her feet.

  Yes, that’s cute, that jester boy

  on a wicker horse.

  Lord knows where that one came from.

  But here, behind it, an Egyptian bust,

  carved from marble—

  it looks like Nefertiti, I think—

  and a brass camel standing beside it.

  Do you suppose she saw the pyramids?

  Lord, what would that be like?

  She never said she did.

  Nice fellow he was, that son of hers.

  Efficient, too,

  with the payments, arrangements and paperwork.

  They all drove in from Oregon, eight of ’em,

  blonde and tan and trim and full of juice,

  like they spent all their days hiking,

  or climbing rock faces.

  I asked him if he’d do a eulogy.

  “No, not me. Not a chance!”

  Shy about speaking in public, I guess.

  But that meant that no one said anything—

  at her funeral, I mean, I was there—

  just the preacher from her old church,

  who said some nice words,

  but he hadn’t seen her in years.

  It was mostly the people

  from here at the home who went.

  And the eight from Oregon.

  They buried her next to her husband,

  who died many years ago.

  Next to his name on the gravestone was hers,

  already carved there.

  Down below her name it said:

  “December fifth, nineteen twenty-two to…”

  and that’s all it said.

  She lived on without him for fifteen more years,

  always with that grey stone on his grave

  showing her name and the day she was born,

  just waiting for that one last date to be carved.

  Have you seen the beer stein with couples dancing?

  “Ein fröhlich Herz heilt allen Schmerz,”

  it says on it. I looked it up:

  “A cheerful heart heals all pain.”

  That was her.

  She smiled and had a dry little laugh.

  People liked her.

  She never talked of Germany,

  She talked of Oklahoma City.

  She was born there, I think.

  The one time they had a big snow,

  her brother built her an igloo.

  She’d tell me that story whenever it snowed.

  She told all her stories again and again,

  so I learned them all.

  That sand dollar there, it says “Key West.”

  Hemingway’s house, and sailboats and palm trees.

  She once walked on beaches in Florida’s sun—

  and then spent her old age talking of igloos.

  But that’s how it goes with these old ones.

  You know what I mean, Eva—

  memories all like domino chains.

  You put down domino number one,

  then two, then three,

  until you’ve placed number fifty.

  Then you tip over fifty, it trips forty-nine,

  then goes forty-eight, plunk, plunk, plunk!

  The first laid down are the last ones to go.

  Right here is a piece of the Berlin Wall—

  I’m serious. The paper with it says,

  “…acquired on seventeen November, nineteen eighty-nine…”

  That was during the Fall of the Wall.

  All the East and West Berliners

  trying to sledge their way to each other,

  through that wall that had cut them in two

  for all of their lives.

  But she never talked of that.

  Now that pretty china creamer, Eva,

  that would suit you to a T.

  And who knows? Maybe I’ll see you

  on Antique Roadshow someday.

  The man will turn this creamer over

  and read aloud off the bottom:

  “ ‘Ridgway Potteries, Ltd. England.

  Established seventeen eighty-nine.

  The Maple Leaf Tartan Collection.’

  And a finer example I’ve never seen.”

  And then he’ll ask what you think that it’s worth,

&n
bsp; and you’ll have no idea, of course.

  “To the right collector,” he’ll say,

  “it might fetch a thousand dollars.

  Yes, certainly that, or more.”

  And you will gasp and say,

  “I had no idea!

  Why, it was free,

  and I just picked it up on a whim!”

  Such a variety here.

  Egypt, Norway, Russia,

  Germany, England…

  World War Two, now.

  She remembered that quite well.

  She was twenty-one then,

  traveling half way across the country

  in nineteen forty-three,

  so she could be a part of it all.

  She worked for the Navy Department

  in Washington, D. C.

  She walked all over that town, she said,

  wearing out her high-heeled shoes,

  which were hard to come by then.

  She talked of that a lot,

  here, where she couldn’t walk to the bathroom.

  Sometimes she’d rub her aching old feet,

  and say how it might not have been a good thing,

  all of that walking in heels.

  I see you eyeing that lidded glass jar.

  It’s the deepest blue I’ve ever seen;

  and those golden figures of goddesses.

  It’s my favorite. On the bottom it says,

  “Handmade in Greece, twenty-four karat gold.”

  Have you ever seen pictures of Greece?

  Of those islands, those buildings?

  To walk down those narrow ways,

  so stepped and worn,

  walking past round plastered houses,

  all bright and bone-white

  against a blue sky

  and the darker blue of the sea,

  in sunshine as sweet as an orange…

  Why did she never talk about Greece?

  On second thought, Eva, I’ll take that jar.

  I’ve got a small shelf at home.

  It can go there.

  So what if it’s her memory, and not mine.

  Everything once belonged somewhere else,

  meant something different

  to someone else.

  Besides,

  one day I’m going there,

  to the Greek Isles.

  No! I don’t have the time right now

  and I don’t have money;

  but some day, somehow, I’ll do it.

  I’ll walk down the streets of—

  Where? Santorini?—

  and find something there to put in this jar.

  Maybe a seashell, perhaps some old coin,

  or the cap off a bottle of ouzo I drank.

  And then I can think of her,

  shoes cast aside,

  standing up straight,

  face to the sun,

  dipping her toes

  in the warm Aegean Sea.

  Those days that she lost,

  maybe I’ll find them there.

  Maybe I’ll keep them a long, long, long time.

  April 10, 2013

  The Dust Bowl

  I have a cow

  I have a