SNOWSCAPE
Flakes gathered
on a stone,
on a leaf,
on the arm of a lawn chair left out.
A coating of snow, I suppose
I could say.
Yet
each object
holds
its own.
WHITE ON WHITE
The white lettering pasted
onto his front bass drum head
blends into its white background, so no
full words emerge
to name the snappy society quartet
for which he was the drummer.
My teenage grandfather, cigar
jutting out, brandishes
two sticks in one hand and a tambourine in the other
for this sepia-toned, Roaring-Twenties
publicity photograph.
If, say, fourteen, he had ten years to live before
his fatal auto accident and made use of them:
played in a band on a boat to Europe; played
on a cruise to the Caribbean; filled-in, one night,
with Paul Whiteman (the biggest bandleader of the day);
married a beautiful, tender woman; fathered my father.
And left this blanked-out—so iconic—lettering.
THE BRONZE BUST
I forgot to buy milk
and needed wine
so I threw my coat on
and clopped downstairs
with the shops across the street in mind
when I saw, in my building foyer,
a life-size bronze bust
of Gene—one
he fashioned when a young artist
of his beautiful young self—receding
atop a wooden dolly, an appraiser
giving instructions to the mover
in her British accent.
I literally clutched my heart, having
known this bust nearly thirty years
as it presided over the entry hall
of Gene’s apartment, a bust
passed countless times by my wife and me
and our two boys when Gene invited us up
for tea and pastries, a bust that seemed to watch
its model’s manifold life unfold before its
attentive, sensual, unchanging gaze.
But Gene, at ninety-one, his memory deteriorating
by the day, felt it was time to deaccess
his kept work while he could handle it
judiciously, stripping
his apartment of every piece, a process
about which he was unsentimental—or
so the appraiser reported when I confessed
my stab of pain.
And she, of course, was as unsentimental as he,
just doing her job while I stood and watched this
emblem of Gene’s full life—and emptying memory—
fade away, its tender face to me.
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