Limoncello

By Dan Leamen

I.  Burial

Flare of beard cut to fresh grass,
fingernails brittle as bread crust,
hands, wells from which your
wife could no longer draw touch
by lowering the bucket of her body,
the years of pipes, cornfields, meat
lockers, and pig’s blood, a collapsed farmhouse. 

 

II.  Library

In the slow sunroom
your hand combed through volumes
stacked in the sturdy library of your chest,
eyes like Christmas lights beneath snow,
you spoke for hours, rickety car of your mouth
wandering down the dirt road of your memory—
I listened not enough,
watched the tree slowly undressing on my wrist.

 

III.  House

You built this farmhouse,
lazy archeology of fingers
carving the sagging spine
of the stairs, Atlas succumbing
to the Babylon of osteoporosis,
the four white petals of your
bedroom bowing in your Autumn’s construction.  

 

IV.  Sleep

I imagine the way you made love, the nights
you came in from the Earth sweat-soaked,
oil-blood Levis draped over chair,
boots at the doorway like clasped hands at an altar,
your difficult body pouring between the sheets,
the harmony of your distant thunder coiling into her quiet cicada shell.

 

V.  Room

I stare at the hospital bed
stiff as a tooth,
small television,
piles of inhalers,
table of beads and unfinished dolls,
graveyard of crossword puzzles,
the packages of chewing tobacco
which smell of oil and black licorice—
how silent is the room of the dead.

 

VI.  Funeral

I spoke in the tongue of picking grapes,
your five sons side
by side your casket, scars
between them washed smooth by your blood.   

 

VII.  Father

Before you called, you
pulled your car to the shoulder, I

imagine silence, your
face in your hands,
your mouth a gutted Bethlehem. 

Your words rolled in small town
drawn on bank of a country creek.

 

VIII.  Limoncello

Grandfather, months later,
in the hills of Italy,
I bought moonshine Limoncello
from a man who is now wearing your hands.
 
This man spoke no English.
I chewed my tongue to a stub,
begged him to tell me the story of my blood.
 
                                                                                    for Cutty

Published January 2010