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Requiescat…
In retirement, Dad had a second life
humping stuff
for St. Vincent de Paul, Goodwill &
the local soup kitchens:
canned army-surplus fruit, stale,
day-old bread from bakery outlets,
dead men's clothes – spring jackets
in autumn, winter coats in summer –
humping anything available.
Call him in the dead of any night, & out
the door he’d fly, maybe heading for
the Greyhound bus station
to give a down-&-outer a lift to
the Milwaukee midtown YMCA,
often slipping him a fiver without asking
anything in return.
The next evening you’d catch him
driving out to the County Home
(what the old timers still called the Poor Farm)
on the city’s outskirts,
a four-floor, red brick, Depression Era structure
for stacking in veterans
& collections of old geezers like so much cordwood,
eight or more in what
were then called dorms with the urine stench
so ungodly rank & desperate
for fresh air that the odor would manage
to crawl out past the screen doors
& wicker rockers lining the veranda
in an attempt to make a beeline for
any visitor’s arrival, the stench smacking
a visitor in the face before
asking if he’d like to come in,
sit for a spell & chew the fat. But
rest assured, Dad wasn't any sort of saint,
not by a long shot.
He’d say he was just an everyday bloke
who preferred sitting in on
a couple hands of canasta before
heading back home if a few
of the boys had some time to kill
& nowhere else to go.
A saint? He’d give you the horse laugh
on that one!
Just another working stiff
who didn’t get beyond
the eighth grade, never read much,
& couldn’t suffer wasting
a perfectly good summer evening
sitting in front of the TV.
Even after the cancer landed him in
one such home, he still enjoyed
playing a hand or two before shuffling off
to empty his "bag" for the night.
At his funeral, the only prayers I found
worthy of him were from his old buddies,
those who humped stuff too, but they didn’t have
much to say either, just their same
uneasy self-conscious shuffling of feet
with that characteristic look my father also had
when words would fail him. They had that same shuffle
for my father, for themselves,
& I pray maybe a bit left over for me as well,
a silent prayer to the Maker who, looking
down on all of us standing there, also held tightly
to His silence, keeping any
pertinent comments He might’ve held to Himself.
© Terry Savoie
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| Terry Savoie |
Terry Savoie’s poetry has been included in over two hundred literary journals such as APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, Commonweal American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Review as well as in recent numbers of North Dakota Quarterly, One, and America, among others.
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