Lucia Galloway
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Sawdust and Memory, a Letter to my Father
There is an essence rising from the sawdust
carpeting the floor around the “horse” and
from blond corkscrew curls from the plane—
a fresh, fir fragrance of the lumber yard.
You are remodeling our house, and I am filled
with Christmas-like anticipation,
what I felt when you were building me a doll house
whose roof came off and each story lifted off in turn,
baring rooms where dollhouse people lived.
Your dollhouse disappointed me, for I had coveted
the “fourth wall” model in the Sears Roebuck catalog.
But these were your gifts, Dad, to Sis and me.
Now you’re making us a trapezoid—its walls and ceiling
fitted into the space under the ridge-pole beam—
one of the gallery of attic bedrooms where we’ll sleep
after leaving our places off the downstairs hall.
Those rooms you’ll make into an apartment up for rent,
the money into savings so that we can go to college.
Compared to this, it must seem to you and Mom
a minor inconvenience to have to pass through
our room to use the only bath. Nor will you fret that always
you’ll leave the door ajar to vent the steam while showering.
At times you must have thought of your own early years
in two- or four-room houses. A family of three,
then four when little brother came along. Eventually
I came to know your story: always the other bodies,
like birds in a nest, heads brushing breasts and wings,
every sense alert, even when they seemed not to watch
or listen. But trees—the trees were in your favor.
There, wedged in the space a branching trunk afforded,
someone had built a platform scarcely visible, even from
below. And there your genius seeded among broad leaves.
Even when you descended, luck came with you.
Maples deposited their winged missives in your pockets.
Pinecones clung to your mittened hand. Your father
bought a grander house with outbuildings, and one of these
became your shop—the old smokehouse, where lingering
in the walls, faint acrid sweetness mingled with the
nutmeg whiff of shavings from your plane. All, all of this
had gone to make a builder. You had swallowed an acorn,
and the oak sprouted through your fingers
into windmills and boats, houses for birds and dolls.
Four Elegies, with and without Eros
To Paul, Steve, Uncle Ray, and Cousin Larry
I was in tights under a thigh-length
shirt when first we met
at the coffee urn—faculty
advisors at the freshman camp-out.
Parents came one crisp October day
to visit their kids’ classes.
You admired my glen-plaid suit,
said you’d like to pin a mum
there on its left lapel—
one of those giant yellow mums
for Saturday football games.
* * * *
We two at the ropes course
afternoons at 4:00: you harnessed
nervous kids into the zip-line gear.
I unhitched them at the end of
every flight, waited while they
found their legs again.
Already seated, I could not help
when you swayed, stumbling
up five steps to take the stage.
Applause rained like hail, tailing
words like paper airplanes swooping
finally toward you.
* * * *
Arguing with Uncle Harold
which were the bad guys, which the good,
you left off to pose for a photo—
slacks without their crease,
necktie slightly crooked like
your smile skewed
by the slanting sun.
Squatting on a knee, closer
to my Lilliputian height, you
gathered me in to the camera’s view,
whispered my pet name in my ear,
and I was Eesha My Eesha,
tucked in beside your thigh.
* * * *
We sat Indian fashion
on old Miss Dexheimer’s parlor floor.
She read aloud from Kipling.
Couldn’t we just go see the movie?
was what you said.
You ran away to play
with Judy Spear: hair
the color of our mothers’ fox furs.
Like you, an only child.
Lucky sometimes, like me.
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Lucia Galloway, along with Frances Ruhlen McConnel, chairs “Poetry in Claremont, Fourth Sundays,” a monthly reading series. Her two books are Venus and Other Losses (Plain View Press, 2010) and Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). Recent work appears in The Comstock Review, The Sow’s Ear, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Inlandia, Poemeleon, Psychic Meatloaf, The Dirty Napkin, Red River Review, The Prose Poem Project, qarrtsiluni, and Stirring. Visit her website at www.luciagalloway.com.