In Memory of Robert George Minard
July 16-17, 1935

Eugene Minard

		I
	November 1959
The wind runs the cream 1958 Ford, 
With rusty panels under the doors,
Up the parkway to Evergreen.

I see an autumn, not a fall scene

We drive between granite blocks
Into the oak and elm shaded park.
A negro in khaki slakes his thirst;
Others picnic on Friedrich Schwartz.

Across the drive, the lawn
Margins a cyclone fence:
A brick wall of tenements,
Wrenched stop signs, boards,
Grocery carts butt
A rest room door.

My mother, piqued by the high
Cracked voice of a child's radio,
Damns the red mud on her low-heeled shoes.
She sends my father right
While she moves left
For the lilac with the O-shaped trunk,
To the southeast corner of which 
You will find a two by three foot patch
Of English ivy:
Twenty-four years--is it two by four, or five
--is it still alive?

My father walks back:
"grave site 906."
I see a child attack.
My brother Robert sits
Under the ivy--
Down, down.

I find it one foot deep,
but the bush is gone.
There was a depression
Where my mother slipped.
Up, over the hill,
Where the real trees are,
My father's mother is 
A tall, brown granite bar.

To end November the trees have peeled
The late leaves off;
The color of the grass is buff;
And there are clots of dead mum stalks.

		II
	February 1968
I follow down the treeless hill
To the infants' section of the old grave yard
And look for the ivy plot and small,
Bronze plaque of Robert George Minard.
The heavy rains have worked out 
Hollows in the soft, red earth.
It runs as my feet press down;
That that liquid runs is worse
Than that his was the improper color,
Or that his heart was weak.
It oozes, sucks--makes noises
That he could not make.
Stalks, twigs, branches snap.
I slip at a depression and my ankle aches.
That child's bones
Were bones too soft to break.
Now in the wet graveyard,
We seek each other out.
I go to another roe
Of small, untended graves.
None seem to have the plaque,
The bronze rectangle on a pointed stick,
Which bears his name. At the third grave,
I kick into a pile of brown, dead things.
I strike home. I pluch him out.
The hard straight underedge of bronze stings. 

		III
The clothes slosh in the gray
Water of the washing tub.
In 1944,
My brothers play war games
In the cellar of a rented house.
My sister watches from wooden steps
With spaces at the back.
Richard clowns; he sticks
His hand into the wringer.
He howls until my mother
Comes to pull him out:
She looks for blood.

Twenty years before,
in Fall River, Mass.,
My mother slipped 
at berry picking.
She cut her wrist
On a broken piece of bottle glass.
In a cold water, wood stove flat,
A rat chewed on the knuckles 
Of my Uncle's hand. The rat ran 
Out of time when my mother came.
She screamed: he could not break the skin.

One day in 1949.
Washing in the cellar
Of a Newer house,
she heard a two foot tall,
Cotton stuffed clown doll
Fall down the wooden stairs
To split its head.
I spit green bile.
She's heard it all:
The green spread over the concrete floor,
The blood dry, and then she saw it all.
My father's mother dies:
The tall, brown woman in my dream.
The cast iron frying pans
Are gone into some 
Strange house.