Home Movies: A Sort of Ode

Because it hadn’t seemed enough,

after a while, to catalogue

more Christmases, the three-layer cakes

ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard

Billy took a shovel to,

Phil’s lawnmower tour of the yard,

the tree forts, the shoot-’em-ups

between the boys in new string ties

and cowboy hats and holsters,

or Mother sticking a bow as big

as Mouseketeer ears in my hair,

my father sometimes turned the gaze

of his camera to subjects more

artistic or universal:

long closeups of a rose’s face;

a real-time sunset (nearly an hour);

what surely were some brilliant autumn

leaves before their colors faded

to dry beige on the aging film;

a great deal of pacing, at the zoo,

by polar bears and tigers caged,

he seemed to say, like him.

What happened between him and her

is another story. And just as well

we have no movie of it, only

some unforgiving scowls she gave

through terrifying, ticking silence

when he must have asked her (no

sound track) for a smile.

Still, what I keep yearning for

isn’t those generic cherry

blossoms at their peak, or the brave

daffodil after a snowfall,

it’s the re-run surprise

of the unshuttered, prefab blanks

of windows at the back of the house,

and how the lines of aluminum

siding are scribbled on with meaning

only for us who lived there;

it’s the pair of elephant bookends

I’d forgotten, with the upraised trunks

like handles, and the books they meant

to carry in one block to a future

that scattered all of us.

And look: it’s the stoneware mixing bowl

figured with hand-holding dancers

handed down so many years

ago to my own kitchen, still

valueless, unbroken. Here

she’s happy, teaching us to dye

the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian

urn of sorts near which—a foster

child of silence and slow time

myself—I smile because she does

and patiently await my turn.

they’re never too young: Forget Me Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart by Mary Ann Hoberman