Hastings Poem by Jack Otterberg

For Robert Anderson; In Memoriam


you died on a
particularly gray day.
Elkhorn stilled in autumnal rain,
cars packed statuary in high school
parking lots. boys who were too sorry
to know you
would smoke out cigarette butts
on the ends of their trickling childhoods. a
thickened stench of ignorance
draped over their threadbare clothes.

I was in creative writing class—
scoffing out budding arrogance
from what I thought was good
poetry, when momma, your daughter,
texted us the news.

we were shocked. not as much as
grandma, your wife, who refused
to stoop at the hospice bedside
when you were dying.
I can't stand seeing him this way
she wailed.

so your daughter comforted you,
as your ocean-teal eyes fogged into
that other world.
where, perhaps, you pluck geraniums
with God, the way you may have
from boyhood in Hastings.

I don't know. I'm only supposing.
I'm scrawling this poem on the back of
a whipping wind
so it carries itself to you.


*

momma tells me what you said to her
at my birth.
"you can stop now—
this one's perfect".
but as I plop belly down on my crumbed gray bed,
I think you must be scowling at me
from heaven's rainbow hotels. you
must be disappointed with
what I've become.

a muttering witless idiot. stumbling
around indigo-lit night streets,
howling f-bombs and god damnit's
and…

I can't dig into the issue's crust
without peeling a veil of guilt
I must wear.

yes— my
teeth rot yellow anymore from the
lines I've choked inside me- the lines I've
punched in the crammed corners of my
brain.
that is, I'm sorry. I should've loved you
more.
should've felt some tingling despair
when your spirit burst through your body's
wall.
off past midday air, into the squinting
shoeshine light.

perhaps I'm hesitant to pour the words
across the paper.
after all; your rapid decay
was my fault. at least that's what the voices
whisper,
bending their mouths nearer and nearer
my own karmic demise.

*

what a good man you were! I used to
watch the method with which
you rose your slumped body
out the pink chair and
limped over to the dinner table.
shoes scuffling along our dust-
bathed floorboards.
before we sent you to hospice.

I zoomed by every day, tried
wedging a stone-heavy guilt
into my wilted psyche.
sure, I visited you sometimes.
though I still couldn't force the
dead to walk inside me. I couldn't
feel that grief, that sadness
which poked holes in my family's
eyes.


*

I remember your retirement party—
80 years old, and finally quit the
banking job. you loved what you
did. got backstabbed before this job; but
found a home, and still
loved.

swelled your life with adoration
for living. you'd stare out sun-glinted
windows, or up at the
wide-boxed television, or spit witty
one-liners, or scribbled
wisdoms across your chapped lips.
even the smooth syllable of your name
was folded in gold.


*

now that my childhood has plunged
into umber decay, I
think I'm grappling with dead memories.
I pry at the words, toss the wrong lines
in the trash can. but I
never find the correct poem. I could
alchemize your ashes into
tulips. but something that sacred, that
untouched
doesn't deserve to be humanized.

so I'm scrolling my phone, as a
crackling wind heaves its breath
on this foreign city's balding
rooftops. I'm scouring for
something that remains beautiful
enough
to be unseen.