ocean
1
As a child I imagined that the ocean had nothing
on you in terms of vastness and the ability
to envelop and occupy space in such a way as to
comfort, scare, and, later, to frustrate.
2
You were four years a father to a little
brother (the man of the house at age ten).
You became an orphan when you lost your mother
at age fourteen. Just six years later
my arrival made you a real father.
Yours left one morning to assemble engines.
You've never talked about that day. The image
I've always had is a long grey school hallway,
your mother or uncle (or both) silhouetted
against the snowy sunlight streaming through
the double doors behind them.
You and Tom walk toward them, smiling, surprised,
with chilly red cheeks, still in your
secondhand coats, hats, mittens,
fresh from first recess.
I can never picture grandma doing anything
other than smiling. In every dream or mental
image I've ever had of her, she wears the same
self-conscious smile that she has on in the
only picture we ever had of her. Was she smiling
that day? What did she do to try to comfort you?
What did you do to comfort yourself? Her?
I sometimes wonder if the vivid, everyday
smell of bacon frying or the nondescript
sameness of every school hallway you have ever
walked bring that day back in an unstoppable
waterfall of blurry snapshot memories.
What was your father to you? Do you remember?
What is he now? How large or small is the
wake he left?
3
Your father’s brother took you in. A small
cabin-like home that now housed seven
became the place that we visited on
Christmases and Easters like some sort of
peculiar cemetery.
Something about the word “uncle” has
always left me with a feeling of rigid
detachment or loss and unable to make
up for the absence of a grandfather.
Nothing comforting or vast, tangible
but counterfeit in the ways that a roof
and open arms are never quite a home.
4
How must it have made you feel? Your uncle tried.
Did you feel he did? Or did he seem just
a poor substitute, a conch to hear the
ocean through, alone, while standing in a
bronze Michigan field.