Parents at the Meridian

For my parents

The two of them, long dead, rest in photos

At opposite ends of our living room mantel

Mother at the south end, father to the north

Restless souls on display, but she controls

The meridian as certain as her life line

And her silence for most of a century

Outliving her first husband by almost sixty years

My father by thirty, leaving a domestic refrain:

“She survived two husbands, two wars

And at least seven children” who are all

In this room, broadly, on the mantle

Generation on generation with bits and pieces

Of her story: the wobbly German airships

With bombs over her Kent home in 1916,

The Battle of Britain, tears over Dunkirk

The German paratrooper who might have dropped in

And then the Yanks to the rescue.

There are other voices, other rooms where siblings

Speak softly of their time in orphanages

Without seeing their mother for months

And years: a brother desiring a fresh tomato

A sister praying for relief from abuse

Another remembering her mother’s boyfriends.

When the room darkens some might talk

About their mother’s erotic life, her wildness

And perhaps her other children roaming the countryside.

As the room darkens further, more voices can be heard

One remembers my father, long in the shadows,

Working six days a week as a gate guard

To bring wife and three sons to America.

In a letter to my mother he wrote

“America will be better for the boys.”

Soon after he died.

Years later he appeared in my dream window

Smart in his London bobby’s uniform

At full attention on the mantle

While I wonder if such dress and demeanor

Would make me taller and smarter

And I later realize that the shadows parents cast

Reside on the meridian, begging to be heard

A slow crawl across that wicked mantle of time

An at-sea capstan summoned to reel our stories in

Like memory knots on an endless rope

Fishing in the open sea.