End of the Line
The box smells damp, decayed, perhaps like the casket
the teenage boys dug up when I was 10, pulling out
Clara Smith from 1850, propping her up at the Valley Street
bus stop: black crinoline dress, lace-up shoes, pleated
bonnet, hair flying around a face of bones and holes.
Halloween prank the paper said no living kin.
That made it OK for them, I thought, to put the photo
on the front page and for me to find it funny,
the bus pulling up, opening the door, unable to board,
didn’t have the fare, so Clara was caught bone-handed
on Saturday morning, trying to get home, but not back
to Jesus, just to her kitchen with those ancient potholders
and a drawer crammed full of keys, covered buttons,
small porcelain knobs, yellowed envelopes containing
snips of hair only she could remember.
Perhaps the boys had done her a favor?
***
Obituaries say no living kin, never living kin. Close kin
and close predeceased are named, while nephews
and nieces who drifted away or ran for their lives
are too many to count, or never counted, and are called
numerous for those who want to say at least something.
I cut through layers of twine and a warning
in my great aunt’s loud cursive don’t ever throw away.
As the childless renegade, I’ve ignored these
curled-up photos of my not living kin, shuffled together,
clinging to each other in a moldering montage, peering
around broken edges at me, or rather eternity. Some smile,
some would never, and I sink into all I don’t know
and how they’ve come down to me, the last to be seen
alive with them. What would they have me do now,
we who never knew each other but are part and parcel?
A declining world catches in my throat.
I’d like to leave my Claras and James Henrys
at the bus stop some dark morning.
***
Instead, I hold them up to the light and touch their faces,
read what’s written on their backs. Great-grandmother
Elizabeth with her solemn face and the dress she made.
William James with scuffed shoes, hands clasped.
Edith and Harold in wicker chairs. Gravestone
of infant Marion and mother Ernestine, 1887.
Martha, Richard, Kathleen, Emily, Garnard.
Ahhhh, I say. Ah-men, Ah-women.
Ah to the theys and the not-theys and the many ways
we name ourselves. I say thank you.
I will make a boat of you and set you on the water.
I will wait for wind.
The seldom rain
brims the edge
of drying leaves
and hesitates
before it drops
as beads
that bounce
that break
but never saturate
the pavement
we have made.
The world’s grown hard.
It dessicates.
All that flies
is bullet-shaped.
My body that was once a lake
is now in drought.
You see the very least of me,
my fears my doubts
have hollowed out,
and all that I’ve held back from you,
especially my love for you,
the ways I haven’t touched.
The world’s grown hard.
It dessicates.
All that flies
is bullet-shaped.
This empty gourd can still make sound.
My feet can pound the sand.
I fiddle forth this dance for you.
I sing this song.
I let my cheeks grow wet.
Linda Aldrich has published three collections of poetry, most recently, Ballast (2021). She won the 2023 Maine Poetry Award for Short Works, and was the Poet Laureate for Portland, Maine, from 2018 to 2021.