Write a poem about one extraordinary moment in your life.
That was the assignment for the second session of my mid-day Monday writing class.
I seldom compose poems, and when I do, what emerges is often about my Evans-Stafford-Svelstad-Alexander family – you know, those people I don’t share blood with but with whom I share soul covenants. And, I’ve shared just one of those poems publicly – then in an English masters thesis, which pretty much guaranteed fewer than 10 readers.
So, what am I doing here in actually posting a poem? Completing two other parts of the assignment: writing to break open something that’s refused budging in other forms/genres, and to break out of the self-censoring that starts with “…because people won’t read it, or like it, or respond, or…”
In completing the assignment – and making use of my blog again, I’m finally letting it go into the world days after it was due:
Houston
Rockpile Records — Dean Martin’s Houston in hand —
I flick through bins of vinyl with new questions:
Did you also walk this boulevard between your home and work?
Did you walk into this very shop with curiosity to hear new music?
Or to find a familiar sound, a soothing voice in the used vinyl section?
Maybe the art supply store – where I later learned you worked – was your Montrose Boulevard destination,
just a six-minute walk from the Rockpile, so I bypass the brand new 2001 rental car, taking Deano
— who you and my dad resemble: olive complexion, substantial nose, and black hair that waves without effort —
on a walk, amending the “Houston” chorus to match the direction that brought you here
Well, it’s lonesome in this old town
Everybody puts me down
I’m a face without a name
Just walkin’ in the rain
Goin’ forward to Houston
Houston, Houston
Drawn to the photography and drawing aisles, my pace is unhurried,
hopeful of some metaphysical sign of you. In the deep quiet, I leave
with black red green purple LePen markers for journaling in that coffee shop,
the one built around a decades-tall and -broad hawthorn tree where I add new questions
(How) Will I grieve an uncle who “is gone missing”?
(Why) Will I now look for evidence of a life lived or for a person no longer living?
(When) Will I stop having those dreams of a next time where we sit, sip, and sup?
That pocket-size journal holds Montrose gay neighborhood and boulevard roving moments,
scrawls made over eggs benedict, tamales, seafood, at bookstores and multiple coffeeshops
but there are no scrawls recording chats with gay men who find other places to be
when the table talk shifts to the queer niece looking for her fairy godfather uncle.
Walking a route linking five addresses I’ve dug up for you in rudimentary 1990s online searchers,
I learn neighborhood ambiance, flora, and vistas, and talk with the tarot reader I find along the way,
who pulls cards acknowledging the roadblocks in finding evidence of you, asking about our last time together.
Not yet calling it a last time – just a Labor Day holiday-noisy kitchen with extra hands doing as Gram asks,
a backyard with the quiet contemplators and puzzle completers who will be hearty eaters and talkers
a dining room where you and I share the table setting task allocated to youngest ones present
– you, the youngest brother whose purple Gremlin carried just a few things on leaving behind
a California husband and art life, and a need to land at this familiar – if also lonesome, old space
– me, the only grandchild regularly present, the one who will read all the books generations had shelved
in this house. There, then I began coming out to myself – holding questions I could ask you, next time
next time to be in person, Thanksgiving 1972
You. Were. Gone. Poof.
– perhaps why I remember you so vividly in 2005 my next time
of going forward to Houston. Houston, Houston, and your National Cemetery gravesite: M2 1329 –
where I would bring the message your friends had chosen – Rest in Peace – home with me.
