Michigan on my Mind

I've heard this story about my great grandfather as long as I can remember. Him coming to America to search for his dad and finding him in less than ideal circumstances. My Nama and Nampa gave me a retelling of it last summer or fall I believe and I've been pondering it ever since.

I was too young to have much of a lasting impression of my great-grandpa. I thought he was a little scary. And it may be a stretch to say I had no affection for him but I just don't have enough memory to retain some fondness. It sounds like a terrible thing to say about your grandpa's father but I barely remember him.

In fact, his funeral was the first funeral ever for me. (Or that I remember.) And the only thing I remember was being intrigued, interested in this new sort of spectacle. I think I even understood death in some small sense and still didn't care. Is that terrible? I'm not sure. This is a poem that came out of it.

Family Crests

My Great-Grandfather was old country,
spoke German, read the Michigan Deutsch papers.
An American Story, finding his way to the auto boom
to sow sons in the palm of the Great Lakes.
Sent to America at twelve by a concerned mother
to find a vanished father, maybe in trouble,
because post cards and money had ceased.
He sailed over, trailed him to the Prohibition wilds of Chicago,
where all he found was a body, a hooker lover,
and a ring etched with old family crests.
This was not the person I knew.
I was a child, and children have no use for context.

At the farm house in Bangor,
I avoided the mushroom of his breath, his flannel hugs.
The rock harsh consonants of his language never sounded doting.
In the must of his den, I’d act polite long enough,
to have him offer a Brach’s and shoo me
to spend the rest of the day petting his old horse,
feeding it crackers and onion grass.
Sometimes I’d show him toys, gifts from my dad,
sent from a far away land called Georgia,
a kudsu stricken state too distant to see me,
or write me on more days than my birthday.

We had no fondness for each other then
and I have less now, but perhaps a question.
If I could be as old as I am and speak to him,
I’d go back to the day we stood over his dead horse,
in the heavy grass of his field, swatting deerflies,
my grandparents inside making arrangements,
just him and me under the din of insects.
Between us, the otherness of the horse,
the awkward impatience of death without grief.
I’d ask him if this is how he felt over his father,
if this is how I’ll feel someday over mine.
And he’d respond in our language, decipherable
to sons lacking shadows.