I never thought

I would have a hunched-back grandmother

She shuffles her feet

Moving slowly from worn-out carpeted room to the next

Still on the same green

 

My grandfather struggles

Taking care of two

Organizing the week’s pills and drugs

Dropping hot coffee from strokes

Not remembering

I get offered fake cream cheese

Its Jalapeno-flavored by mistake

 

I visit my grandparents

Once or twice a month

I should more

As I watch them die before my eyes

Slowly

Age into a cold fragile bony lifeless full of love

 

The smell of bad breath I can’t get away from

Because I admit to a certain warmth I have for them

They visited me every day

And I can’t commit to each weekend or each month

I can’t support and call her an ass and we don’t understand

 

She saw her sisters shot

He never saw his brother in Africa

Years of photographs bring tears and stains

 

The stained plastic Tupperware

stained of chicken-matzoh-ball-soup, lox, and tuna fish

I get fed and care packages to take home to my bachelor pad

They die and I eat

I can’t even commit to a god they want

 

My grandfather can’t walk

But never sheds a tear for his strength is what makes him stone

His eyebrows grow like wild bushes and firestorm feeding brush

His eyes after surgery old and aging his cheek permanent with an accent

Thick of Germany

His pacemaker beats

She wets

 

I don’t know when their last bath was

Or if she looks like wonderfully aged Chinese woman I once saw at the New Museum

No more cookies, no recipe, some thin mints and M&Ms

Old, falling apart, deteriorating, bucket of bones cold and white

 

Their plastic has covered that couch for years

I wonder when they will take it off?

When one dies?

To be more comfortable

To feel the fabric of that couch?

Not the plastic sticking to your arms and legs and thighs?

Is the plastic an insecurity?

We protect the home from which we live, but we never fully live?

 

Is it their god that makes them cry?

Or makes them strong?

Does he pray for his mother each evening?

Or does he now pray for his wife?

As he once did for me?

 

Opera singers scream throughout the apartment

Some live, some radio

Some next door

And the green plants flourish

Or die

Never once did I see a bug

Or bullet, only a sword and an award

 

My grandparents are dying

Before my eyes

I want to hold them

I want to save them

I want to wrap them up in gauze and make them Egyptian art

I want to get the recipe

I want to show them my dead deer, my 9INE, my cats, my fat

 

My grandfather has held my hand

He has witnessed me in pain

In horror

In the nude

In the realness of the most fake state imaginable

 

I must have gotten my bright blue eyes

And blonde hair from her

Her blue eyes

As intense as mine

She taught me the language of her god

He taught me the gift of life

Now if I can only find someone to give that gift to

I’d make them happy, if they followed their god

 

 

© 2000 David Greg Harth

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