I take his elbow, hold her woolly hand,
plying the icy channel where
the parking lot is plowed. He makes a hero’s stand,
legs misfiring, feet a fugitive pair
of convicts chained for work-detail:
cheap loafers split, the toe exposed to frosty air
where a cracking, yellowed, horn-like nail
has clawed its way up through the grain,
his feet left bare because he says he doesn’t feel
the snow, and socks are too much work-a strain
to reach out to the body’s ends.
Not even two, the girl’s a fury to contain,
surging as my counterweight defends
against the hazards she can’t know—
she pumps her legs, wriggles to free herself and bends
in half to drag us forward over the snow
while he can only inch along,
coaxed like a draft-horse, my patter soft and low,
“Big steps, fella, big steps, that’s it,” a song
that faintly mocks his palsied mincing.
How they both resent me now, for how I wrong
each with the limits I impose, convincing
neither of my authority—
she’d spin away from us, lose herself in dancing,
while after eighty years he wants to be
left to his dreaming in his bed,
but finds himself revived, lurching dangerously,
for Tuesday at the Diner’s come instead,
our weekly luncheon ritual.
First I’m the loyal valet—I’m here to help her shed
the snowsuit from her snaky limbs and pull
a bib up underneath her chin;
then I’m the surgeon flaying him, to gently peel
his coat from stiffened shoulders warping in
like knotted oak to make a cup
that holds his sagging head. Before we can begin,
a tango backs him to his seat. Strapped up
in her high chair, fixed on his mount,
the lunch is engineered. Whereupon we sup.
Eating for her is lusty entertainment,
play that explains the world—red beans
and rice, fingers and tongue—the mass of each moment
building on what the sum of moments means,
raising the house of countless rooms
that wait, untouched, for her to fill them up. He leans
over his plate, a trembling fork-full looms
like a hummingbird at his face,
and freezes there, his lips pursing, and then resumes
its unsure journey down the hatch. No trace
of pleasure manifests. A door
deep in a mill-town tenement bangs in place,
striking him mute. That repartee of yore,
what Miss Bankhead told him once,
cuff-links and calf’s liver, a martini, neat, before
an eight o’clock curtain, the tropic sun’s
slow transit from the promenade deck
of the Andrea Doria, the boys in France
in ‘forty-six—no salvage nets collect
such flotsam drifting on the sea,
sinking in gray, coiled waves and gone. Crumbs fleck
his shirt, grease glazes the chin. Stoically
I dab. Flat affect. Motor commands.
Brady kinesia. Dopamine deficiency.
Finally, a winter luncheon ends
with a hard fall on frozen ground—
for her, a good tumble every hour tends
to be her best instructor—he makes no sound
when he hits, just lies on his side
blinking straight ahead, waiting to be found
like Quixote thrashed by the teamster, but eyed
keenly by her, as if to learn
the trick of how we grown-ups climb back on the ride.
In his look I see submission burn,
for part of him is snatched away
by the gnawing taker, later to return.
I set him up, check for breaks, and say
something witty, pilot the team
battered but unbeaten to the car where today
I catch us in a hub-cap’s mirrored gleam,
a cartoon of the Sphinx’s riddle:
the girl arriving, an arrow notched and taking aim,
il vecchio in free-fall, parchment brittle,
and I, my arms connecting them,
becoming and decaying, in the perfect middle.
—Peter Spagnuolo
Peter Spagnuolo, who lives in Brooklyn, is currently translating a novel from the Italian. His poems can be found at www.booklyn.org.
