This one, I keep re-reading. I think of my family, and how they work
to send the next generation, and the next, on to this strange and
intimidating world --
and how some who go never arrive --
and how some who arrive never look back --
and how some who arrive never abandon nostalgia for what they no longer have.
How difficult -- impossible? -- it is to arrive, but not leave.
On 1/10/08, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The Relatives
>
>
> The relatives stay close to the food,
> though some of it's alarming:
> vegetables, pastries hitherto unknown.
> If they didn't stay close to the food,
> they would have to cling to the walls,
> which are hostile – paintings, inscrutable objects,
> and books books books, every one of them
> saying I will be on the test
> you thought you flunked and finished years ago.
> Even the wallpaper is wrong: it isn't
> shepherdesses, and teddy bears in the kids' rooms;
> there are no kids. If they move
> away from the food or walls, the relatives
> are among the crowd, and bumped, and *seen:
> the difference of their posture, look, and clothes,
> which is clear enough, though impenetrable to language.
> "They're not even *trying," cries the widow,
> privately. She will be pardoned anything
> of course, but the crowd,
> fair-minded and self-critical, thinks
> *We aren't trying. No one draws *them out.
> Wouldn't we be equally ill at ease
> at their church suppers, Nascar rallies,
> or wherever it is they gather? And some
> try to talk to the relatives
> in the loud, hearty pidgin believed
> to bridge chasms. Until, as evening and the wine
> wear on, the relatives, who stay and stay,
> relax and talk: the cousin
> to a responsive void that is herself,
> about herself; the sister
> unearthing unrevealing hateful stories
> about a man she barely knew; her husband,
> on the verge of sleep in a side chair,
> saying, "The bastard never
> invited us when he was alive." –
> And the guests are quietly outraged by this
> behavior. With death in the house.
>
--
~ SB | http://www.sbpoet.com | =^..^=
|