Winter Home
Just the three of us now.
No sons or brothers or
grandsons or cousins.
It’s not the holidays,
or summertime for
cookouts and everybody
slurping watermelon and jumping
cannonball into the pool.
For a month or more we live
together in your winter home
and I am daily face to face with
my origin and I see noses
that look like mine and
hair and postures and all
manner of mannerisms.
The old man in the corner
chair, asleep at noon is
my inescapable future,
with the TV on and twenty-
four hour news programming
and bottles of medications
for God knows what and
non-understandings and
dinner at five and
generational generalizations
that leave so little in common
that it becomes hard to see
how much we have in
common. But there are
moments…there are
moments, and I become certain
that I am either tethered
undeniably to you both, or to
my love for you both, and the
difference slips away like the
disappearing years.
.