Grandparents

My grandmother (who I have always known as Mama) died last Tuesday. If the Hudson River narrates my relationship with my grandparents (which I think it does, from the necessity of crossing the Tappan Zee to visit them to pouring Papa's ashes into the water five years ago), it continued to do so as I crossed the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge toward my parents' home in New Jersey to mourn and bury.

I don't intend to insult Mama's memory by posting a poem about my grandfather, but I didn't write that until four years after his death, so in the future I hope to write of my grandmother, also. Naturally, though, her death makes me think of Papa. The following is a sestina I wrote a little over a year ago:

Sestina

From where I stood below a length of wooden
stairs and dark sea-salted pines, my grandfather
looked as tall as the Owl's Head lighthouse--
Rockland Harbor's brick and mortar. The glass
refracted only sunlight then, but told of ships
led in by fog bells and blasts and keen eyes

in Maine storms. A hat shadowed his right eye,
deep-set in Dutch features carved from wood.
Skull-struck by a heavy bit of shipboard
equipment on the LST 454 in '43, my grandfather's
optics were rearranged, a socket filled by glass.
Docked at New Guinea, wind dimmed his light

in half, and maybe that is why the pixelled light
of television never charmed his one good eye,
but for golf gleaming through the smoke-dusted glass
of an old Zenith. In the small apartment of a wood-
shingled house near Tarrytown, my grandfather
tread linoleum and sat smoking his pipe, like a ship

in a bottle. He couldn't take days in the shipless
trappings of an old man, and would leave the house
in his tool-chest of a Jeep. My grandfather
zipped around the Hudson Valley with a good eye
for fixing, his hands bent from working wood.
His unshaved bristles, like pinpricks of glass,

scratched my head when he bent to kiss it. The glass
stayed still--not seeing, but seen--in the ship-shape
bedroom where I saw him napping. His wooden
chest had lost a hinge and chipped like lighthouse
paint in salt-sea air. Above the wild roses, my eyes
followed sails on the Penobscot to my grandfather

looking out. The blue sweater my grandfather
wore matched the sky above the glass
frame of the fourth order Fresnel, a sightless eye
in the tower's lantern room for the ships
steering past rock ledges below the lighthouse,
to guide them from a fate of splintered wood.

With one eye on the sea and ships,
my grandfather stood as fixed as glass
by the lighthouse, but aged like wood.

I'm not sure what six words I would choose if I were ever to write a sestina on my grandmother. I jotted some down once on some scrap paper that I can probably never hope to find again. In the meantime, I have not a poem, just a list. Because it helps to remember:

cigarette smoke
Dove soap
General Motors Eastern Aircraft
crossing guard
Thornwood
curlers and tape
The Young & The Restless
crosswords
cookies
tissues in her sleeve
blue eyes
clip-on earrings
life is just a bowl of cherries

Lucille May Love Henken (December 23, 1924 - October 24, 2006)

If you've read this far and for whatever reason want to leave a comment, it would be nice to hear memories of your own grandparents, whether it's a short anecdote, poem, list, or just a phrase. =O)