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HEIRLOOM

  

My parents had one of their rows. What passed my head—

was he reviling the stew and the pearl barley

or was she treating him to her wit, whittling his pride

to the cookhouse failure he couldn’t blanco clean

that he was?—I don’t know, go back though I do.

It was all shock to me, high accusation, noise,

ending in a gesture that has stayed with me

like a negative shadow in an atoll blast,

one of life’s archetypes, one I return to.

He threw down a framed snapshot, one of him

uniformed, twinkling; screwed it into the floor.

The crumpled battle-dress looked doggedly up,

its pose still surviving on the torn sepia card,

the ripped head still as perky in the past.

Ah, I sneered, pommelled by sobs, I knew what that meant:

he was erasing himself. Indeed, I knew—

condescending, hating.

  

                                           Twenty years later

my wife starts off with, ‘The milk hasn’t come, and why?’

So we slide into the chasm, biting and sniping

all the way down to the slurry of despair,

while our child hops in the shouts, juggling her tears

and the incomprehensible she cannot hide from.

With a chair I ram a door into splinters, damned,

to destroy a house I anyway didn’t build.

Later I mend the damage. But will it mend?

My father and I are still not reconciled.

Alan Marshfield

   

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