When You Were Good
A Poem by Laurie Granieri
Did you gather up a lifetime of grace
canning 30 years of piss and spit,
hoarding your softest self
to lavish it on those four days
when our father came home to die?
You, who wore the stigmata all through adolescence
pierced by each thing this world gave you
with its open hand and your closed fist --
those four days, you were whole.
Like a full moon, making men whisper
and forget that they’ve ever been hungry.
A full moon, a ripe circle pasted to a wide sky
wiped clean of stars; taking my breath.
You seemed certain and grown as you cradled him
that October in the dining room beneath the chandelier
nearly dead
dead weight
so heavy now
full (not like a moon) of bile and fluid
his liver giving it back to him after years of beer and wine
sloshing in his gut.
You – always wearing anger like a bathrobe,
sopping up vitriol for breakfast,
fortified by your own bowl of bile,
figuring the constellations and our father
owed you something better
thinking his humanity chipped at you,
stole things you didn’t plan on losing.
I want to show you
yourself,
spread four days flat across the kitchen table
like a map of your life.
But then you were never one for poetry,
for looking up and exclaiming at the night sky,
translating moonlight, acquainting yourself with stars,
making out craggy profiles of old men and rabbits
in the clouds.
Eleven Octobers ago you were greedy for reconciliation
eager to loosen a valve on love
hoping he would not spurn your sacrifices and burnt offerings.
You would not be stopped.
You had a job to do
hunkering down
making up.
We stepped aside and watched.
It was you beside him at the end, at your beginning.
You, alone, together.
Prodigal son, fatted calf, welcome home.
Raise high the chandelier: There will be dancing.
Forget gnashing your teeth.
Quit tracing a finger over the pink scars
puckering your palms.
Because those four days
You were silence. You were grace.
Did you know that?
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