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I once knew a man who said words
so beautifully I wanted to catch them in nets
and use them as bedding. From his chapped lips
syllables dripped like Syntec. Machines purred
at his soft commands. Hearing his chastening whisper,
his stubble tickling my ear, I would shrink
and mourn my battered, childish pride.
At the dinner table, blood trickled down
the bald spot on the back of his head. I would cry,

"You hurt yourself!" He would reply
with a confused look, a request for dressing,
and a little wink as if to say, "I'm here."
On the porch he would survey his land from
Adirondack chairs he built himself.
Unmovable granite, a suburban sentinel,
he protected us from fear and worry,
charging us with only one task: "Check your fluids."
I once knew a man, a mere mechanic, who
could suture shut his own wounds with
fishing line with a kind of quiet discipline afforded
only to monks and murderers. He read mysteries,
watched Dan Rather, and did jigsaw puzzles
with pictures of bridges on them.
And then he was gone. I wrote his eulogy because
my late 40s siblings couldn't: I remembered
the blinding decency of the man, his uncompromising
fairness, and bone-splintering hugs.
My words were heavy, full of wet cotton and sawdust,
and I swayed there beside the cold meat
lying motionless in what was, as he put it,
"A waste of good wood." His old smell, the grease
stink of true work, was replaced by formaldehyde,
his soft eyes squinted, fighting a frost beating
from the core, and his hands, once rough
and calloused, were soft and pale.
The man I once knew did not lay there among
the flowers he had always hated. But as I stood,
shaking hands with the mourners, answering,
"Son" to confused faces of old family friends,
I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Learn more about this author, R. Michael Straight.
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