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SELECTIONS FROM BEAUTIFUL VEINS
Poetry by Joseph Sherman
“Far Away” 1955
This is me without his glasses on. This is him
wearing my best striped summer jersey.
The opened book is a Golden Treasury volume with
sharp gilt edges,
the brass candlestick is from a grandfather’s dining room,
and the heightened flame. . . a forged future,
or so we think to have thought.
There is no certitude in it or in the boy’s
flame-lit face
worked to scale through avuncular instruction
(the photographer uncle), a transitive face, its expression
ordered up as enigmatic — still,
still one life with all the promise of its beautiful veins.
***
The Fake Birthday
David is having a fake birthday
at our house—his sixth—and solemnly
informs us so, even as he confirms that
yes we have presents. “Do you have balloons?”
he asks solemnly as well, and no we do not.
“For your fake seventh birthday,” I buoy
him.
Today he is that rarity, the little gentleman,
awash with information, and prompt to say thank you.
I am suspicious and relieved. He has been
a poster child for the out-of-control, his sisters
lamblike observers, but today
they are ill or rebellious and must be palliated,
even as David impresses us with possibility.
He will be six in another week, but his fake
birthday is what we hope he will remember.
My Beautiful Veins
Define me:
my nurses offer as much
in soft silence, utterances, smiles,
in the semi-regal fluttering
of their swallow hands,
once and again
as this needle and that needle
fall into the flesh (is it mine?),
delivering, taking away.
My beautiful veins
(and they are as described)
speak to health and facility
and swelling alacrity,
so let us get down to business:
smiles may become fleeting
with familiarity’s onset, and
the work of hands and their time be
directed by a wind-challenged avian.
Conceit, conceit. . .
A hospital hums and shivers.
I would rather be beautiful than dead.
***
A Poem out of Pete
For long I thought to know
I shouldn’t spurn him so
but make him into literature. . .
For Pete called my women names
and stole my logs, stealthily,
kvetching to my face
how hard it’d been to heft and
pitch them over the fence between,
one January night,
and he with a broken arm besides.
“You can take them things back,
if you choose,” he barked at me,
rocking on his doorstep,
“They’re too piss-green to chop or burn.”
Yes, that’s a proper cue for laughs,
and, in hindsight, a salute to rude
grit and gumption
and the passion to scavenge and hoard
that was Pete’s life, as neighbour.
He warred with a raucous son
over the junk he claimed from
curbsides across town and hauled home,
trailed for years by Kaya, his Samoyed,
who ate cats, Pete unmoved.
There was the time he’d have had me
help him shift his junk from the curb
where the son had consigned it,
back to the pile propping up his side
of the shared fence,
Pete, who ought to have been recorded,
keening a cappella the country blues
songs his brainpan retained
and recycled through his nose,
years after the infamous cellar tumble
taken at work
that sent him home to his invisible leash.
Day and night a bony frame might
bend into an Island breeze,
might be found three miles way, leaning,
or laconically ambling,
homing instinct on hold.
He died not a year past
his silent wife’s final silence,
of a cancer he never addressed—
there’d been fewer tunes of late
scrawling the night air.
His last neighbourhood tour, truncated—
a night crawl across the far neighbour’s lawn
to say he was hurting,
guessed he’d best see the docs.
And my last image—the week before,
of a millworker’s hat riding
that dance of bones in grayed denim,
aiming an unsteady bike down our street,
to be driven past,
not a glance in my distorting mirror.
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