Family

Family

What is it that Lady Macbeth says

to her crown-ravenous husband, "screw

your courage to the sticking place" ? 

I know she's all on about drugging

the humble guards and slithering 

in to ruff up Duncan, yes, she even

makes that seem valiant, a done thing

after the witches puff their prophecy

over their bubbling pot.  It's like that

going back home, it's slipping a mickey

to the boys on my post, it’s letting

them hold the .410 of my defense

while I rue the stile. It’s trusting

they’ll hand it back to me

when the service is through.  It’s walking

to a grave in the cemetery, where only one

of her three children will be there and one

of those absent two lives just down

the street, five miles maybe as the raven 

nests.  Unarmed I’m just another fly finding

the only bare spot left on the meat.  So.

Let’s just say I hope it rains long enough

that the mortician, who I grew up with,

who knows the whole town’s intimacies,

stands to cough respectfully and queues

us to leave.  We’ll have driven nine hours

to stand on a small hill of grass

to watch the ashes slide in (and here I’m reminded

of how last summer we buried

my sister-in-law, how she was the stone

did you know they did that, made

her part of the granite or whatever

bedrock they hauled up from some Maine

quarry, pulverized and mixed

and firmed her up again to stand beside

her father, dead of lung cancer at 42,

and her brother-in-law, a suicide casualty

thirty years ago.  I’m reminded too how

the eulogy was crashed by a pompous

ass step-father swilling his insulin.  Shit. 

I’ve never met a family yet who didn’t

split in their differences but come

back again to respect the dead.  I’ll

tell you I know mine’s not an exception

but what love are we raised in when

a son (my father) can’t put down

his ax or a daughter (my aunt) can’t

put down her target?  Yeah, so

we’ll come and show our respects

and cry and hug the crowd who came

and then go home and know

as far as family goes, the power

isn’t in some prophecy, it’s in

the nerve it picks, as if that nerve

were a string on a cello or harp

and the bow we draw across

is slick with blood instead

of resin...right.  Draw it across.  Family.