Dust Never Settles

Soft and cool,

my young legs stretched

and toes splayed

in a JC Penney palace

beside you in the old

bed.

The blue room,

where four decades later

you would die.

You read to me,

from the frayed and

musty

pages of library castaways.

You filled to brimming

my young mind

with your presence.

As cream splashes in a bowl

before intimately

attaching to the whiskers

of a rumbling cat,

tales of faraway

and ages

past

clung to and soothed

my

sleepy daydreams.

Poorly written,

yet beautifully illustrated--

the only paths out of

poverty

you owned.

Your thimbled fingers

flipping through

the years,

deft at clipping newspapers,

dextrous with a needle and

patch,

spinning the silver cord

between us.

 

That.

 

That familiar touch,

a mane comb brushed gray hair

against the cheek on my pillow,

a kiss,

a nightly liturgy of “I love you”

“Sleep tight”

“Don't let the bed bugs bite”

and then

darkness.

Sometimes you'd sing

in a splintery swing

with a damp choir of cicadas

the old Carter Family

and Johnny Cash

that we knew as we knew

the rain.

I sang you Coat of Many Colors

there

on the new bed,

that mechanical contraption,

where you breathed your last

without me.

I fed you canned pineapple

and wiped your chin

with a borrowed rag that smelled of
Dawn

and 1983,

when your thimbled hands

nimbly snapped cards

upon a yellow table,

Virginia Slim gin

rummy,

canned Coke

and crackers.

 

You died there beside the old bed

without me,

holding the cold hand of the man

you endured for six decades--

the man whose name is engraved

in our memories,

twinned stationary

with you on

stone.

I came too late,

to find not you but the tears

of my mother

dry upon the Hospice cotton

sheets.

 

I see you.

Everywhere I look,

when I pay attention--

or by surprise,

when I need you.

A warm meal for a hungry soul

at midnight,

home from the bar

a wandering star,

you are there.

At the bottom of a glass of tea

where the ice

gathers to mix

and melt

with spent lemons.

Where the grandmothers live.

In the cool whisperings

at the nape of my

neck.

Affectionate glances from the corners

of my

soul.

A nickel face upon a faraway floor.

In the scent of linen closets,

where time

waits with outstretched hands

and dust never

settles.