My Grandfathers' Mothers

Both of my grandfather’s lost their mothers to death within the first three years of their lives

The parallel gaps of absent affection are startling to me in the way

Neither of my parents has ever appeared overtly zealous in ensuring hugs

The subdued contact is temperate, acceptable and moderated to condoned dosage  

Not that I felt it abnormal as this was my only domestic example

Bathed in the secretes of genealogy and the circumstances of tuberculosis

Of great-grandfather’s who each married their deceased wives’ relatives  

In some sort of customary exchange of sexual and domestic-chore convenience 

As men of the day rearing progeny was tantamount to a uterus spontaneous growing

Upon their famished bellies of tilled soil and labor to the sun in a conundrum of nipples

Bearing cotangent angles of the Mississippi River in St. Charles and Lafourche Parishes

To mix spit and mud and create a miraculous nostrum of hormones and baking bread  

So that these men would marry my grandmothers fostering divergent arrangements

One to war to saddle a machine gun in the islands of the Pacific in Luzon

The other to the oil-slick business-routes of Plaquemines to the derricks of the Gulf

Flying a sea-plane and mallet-iron-struck affluence of golf-club Sunday dinners  

The solider saw the metallic-shrapnel of crossfire burrow Alzheimer’s into his blood

To his brain wandering Westwego to walk off from the bank to the drug store

For my grandmother’s friend to call her home to say, “We found Joe.”

A car trip round about for her to ask him, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

My father’s father to say, “Yes” and a wife drove her husband home  

Contemplating her social security options of who would outlive who

For how long that his life was bathed in the post-military work of asbestos for Celotex

To drown out the noise of the attic fans in rafters 

My father would crawl around in installing evaporator coils

Heaters and other devices to make other family’s children more comfortable
and through each bead of his sweat his own

Knowing his father was a rough man who liked his meat burnt to deter insurgent bacteria

So in, my father reluctantly accepted self-permission to exit ladders from confined spaces  

And spray-painted rebellion on gunner Joe’s walls to a Hendrix Pop-Festival guitar riff

Knowing love was coming, a woman raised like a porcelain doll with a sister and a mother

Bequeathed a queen’s status and a daughter who threw off the girly-girl for a husband

Breaking the boundaries, yet diligent to an apprenticeship to map him to those attics

For Freon and other gases under pressure to prove the hard and the soft could at some point mix

To present a man worthy in a marriage of complementary elements  

As a wife who understood her father never feeling he could do enough to please the mother gone too soon adopted pampering to salve the wound, which created a daughter open to being a wife to a man raised under the harsh edges of a father surviving a missing mom, two wars, two prior children, a son and a daughter each favored by the opposite-gendered parent for him to be a hanging remainder of cell division as the third child, second son with no arms to hold him and now; he is folding into his wife who is bursting with empathy to tell her own father, “You are good enough.” 

And so what a wife’s father would never believe, she could now tell her husband at twenty years old, be-wed and bond a sterling marriage of three children of their own in awe of love’s idiosyncratic symmetry folding into a me, the second son  

Seeing the lines of how I embrace my daughter with a secure love, knowing she needs not a thousand hugs, but that one is more than seven, because at some point in the summation, faith dissipates into the caverns of doubt that reassurance becomes like a self-defeating salve

“Does my parent love me?  How would she treat me now if she was still here?”  

The lack of this security has collapsed the greatest of men into crumbling clay soldiers and fallen angels of the sky, inquiring the darkness of unanswerable ancestries for the very basis of our humanity, “Do you hear me?  Do you see me?  Am I good enough?”  

So secure to know I am loved, Thanks dad, Thanks mom, I love you too.