From a Remote Past: Mother Goose Returns

by Lou Gallo

I.

the clink of my mother’s wedding band

on a cold bottle of milk

delivered fresh to the front door

by the local dairy man.

II.

Grandfather stands trembling

in the doorway clad in flappy underwear,

his mind flappier, startled

to see me, a stranger now, smiling

at him as he stares.

III.

Grandmother slides a jar of honey

across the table to where I sit;

she asks me to open that jar of honey─

her fingers can’t manage it.

IV.

In Uncle’s yard we clacked

stalks of sugar cane

and with Jack’s knife we whacked

a stalk and sipped its sweet juice clean.

V.

My mother beating on the chest

of Mr. Barker lying slumped

behind the wheel of his Plymouth

in the driveway across the street,

the women screeching, I pale

with horror.  I had never seen death

before.  I was Columbus veering

into unknown seas.  I was tomorrow.

VI.

The peg-legged dead man clomped along

our sidewalk in the fog of dawn.

His long lost love they say he sought,

that lady with the frozen heart. 

VII.

MaMaw screeching on the porch

Jackieeeeee—she blasted bananas

from our tree.  Jack was deaf.

I heard for him and he heard me. 

X.

We balanced on the cobblestones

of Bayou Road.  The women

charged into the butcher shop

for prime cuts and t-bones

and then to the Choctaw Market

for a living chicken

as all along we teetered on

those cobblestones. 

XII.

A rag & bottle man’s wagon

aslant on the concrete,

his junk strewn

all over the street,

the rag man himself dazed

and down, a wheel spoke

splintered across his lap,

when the horse collapsed

of a heat stroke. 

XIII.

Riding with Dad in a pickup truck

to unload trash at the city dump,

a place aswirl with fire and ash.

Ruthie and I hop and jump

amid the waste as Dad slips cash

to the man in charge of this burial mass

of rusted springs and bones and shattered glass.

XVIII.

We swung on Grandpa’s wooden back yard gate

until it creaked, sagged and split

in half.  And Grandpa had a howling fit.

XX.

One-hundred-year- old Miss Yunt,

the witch, cursing me and Jack

for tossing street shells at her screen,

her voice a hoarse cream that

only I could hear since Jack

had ripped apart the straps

criss-crossing his chest and back

that held the clunky hearing aid

intact. 

XXIII.

Grandma mashes garlic with

her mortar and pestle;

the scent throughout the house does drift.

Before long we all can tell

we shall shortly eat that smell.

LOU GALLO's work has appeared in Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic (forthcoming), Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth,  Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review,and many others. Chapbooks include THE TRUTH CHANGES and THE ABOMINATION OF FASCINATION. He is founding editor of the now defunct journals, THE BARATARIA REVIEW and BOOKS: A NEW ORLEANS REVIEW.  He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.