Over dinner just now, among the things
we were talking about was how much of teaching
goes unappreciated by the student
until the student is like 30.
It's from like high school--
and therefore, how it's really terrible
that the whole country is moving in this direction
where we want to quantify what it
means to be a good teacher in terms of test scores and things
like that.
But still, my grandfather died when I was 14.
And still, like last week, I was like oh, that's what he meant.
So anyway, this poem is also for him.
It's called "Earth and God."
"And now when I think of what else
my grandfather could have become,
I do not consider the 30-odd shirt -jacs
in every pastel shade possible lining the closet, or the way
his hat fit meticulously at that angle on his head,
or even that I held a straight razor against his throat day
after day to shave him.
I was the only one he let do it.
Or how he rolled up his pants to show
me how the coffee was danced or the years of his turning
the corner every Sunday morning on the stroke of 5 past 9,
lips moving silently, mumbling the rosary as he looked up
to wave Sunday greetings to Miss Murray, and Miss Esme
and Mr Mora and Miss Alphonso.
And though I laugh now, that had I
known those shirt -jacs would be in such fashion 20 years later,
I would have snatched them right out
of the closet with his body still warm in the ground
and fix them about my 14-year-old shoulders.
And what I knew is that my grandfather was
the son of an African washer woman and a French landowner,
that he could have been all things in a different world
at a later time, had his skin not been so black
broiled in the coco sun.
And though I see his face, quiet and unworried
as a baby's in my hand, the skin pulled taut
as my hands learned latitude and nuance,
the way I learned to windmill the razor like Viv did his bat
and scrape the gray hairs of his face
and against the soft hot cloth, I do not remember first,
that he'd been warning my mother and me from months
before he even got sick that the land would be in contention
and that he wanted us to be sure to get what was ours.
Here on the scrubble grass edges of a worrisome habit,
when the bartender pours me the fourth shot and marvels
at my still lucidity and intelligent conversation,
I do not remember first that my grandfather warned
that a visitor could never take just one drink,
that the second was necessary to walk out on two feet.
This, even as he was signing his name
to some momentous important document in Florida,
turn of century ink pot British script, Hudley Vincent de Paul
Bonaire.
And this is not a poem about cricket,
except my grandfather was once young and fast and black.
And when he was 80, I saw him wield a bat
with such fearsomeness, that we all stopped our game
and watched him run and swing and swing again.
And it's probably unimportant that this was no game to him,
chasing down the bigger boy beating me up on the street
in the middle of the game where my mouth had got me
in trouble again.
What I remember is with what ease an 80-year-old man
swung the well-heeled piece of willow
when he saw threat to his male heir.
And I think about his perfect arm action,
as he gathered speed, barefoot on the road that day,
on the balls of his feet and breathing hard,
how he picked up the bat on the run
and swung it like the brushing cutlass
through the cane stalk like the flat machete
through the sweet cocoa pod.
And though this is not cricket, I
remember how he moved like all the other heroes
we were mimicking that day, Gus Logie and Joel Garner, Clive
Lloyd, or Collis King.
I do not immediately remember how
he taught me to discern fever grass from j jerry toot bush
or Shadow bene from useless weed struggling
through the red dirt.
What I remember first is my grandfather
running impossibly fast and impossibly old,
carrying my safety on the razor's edge of a bat.
How he might have been so much else,
but beautiful and reposed.
His leathered face in my hands, he
was every prayer he needed to become, a man of Earth
and to God and to open throat."