|
Paula Sergi is the author of Family Business, a chapbook of original poems, and co-editor of three anthologies: Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, Meditations on Hope and A Call to Nursing. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, along with the Hessen Literary Society, selected her as the 2005 cultural ambassador to Germany, which included a three-month residency in Wiesbaden.
A Wisconsin Arts Board Artist Fellowship recipient, her poetry is widely published, including in such journals as Rattle, The Bellevue Literary Review, Primavera, Crab Orchard Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her essays appear in the on-line magazine The Mad as Hell Club.
|
|
Delayed Image
Because they grew to manhood while I wasn’t looking,
the adult faces of my sister’s boys surprise me
with what is familiar. When we gather at the holidays
one wears my father’s nose, the nose I know only
from photos, our patriarch a smoky grey image
in a pewter frame, passed on, as they say,
passed on when I was young,
many years before the nephews’ births.
We share a dark and biting humor
like the wiry dachshunds mother raised with us,
honed by the bitterness of wanting,
the iron taste of blood in our mouths
passed on. The other nephew laughs
my dead brother’s laugh, so when I turn to share the joke
I’m slow to remember.
Once, drinking ourselves into stupor—another family trait—
I mistook him for that brother, who drank
himself away. I slurred remember when you almost
shot Laura? The safety wasn’t on, the way you thought.
And the dark-circled eyes give us away,
give us what we cannot give away.
It’s easy to blame the dead for traits reviled,
the baldness gene, and shortness. Beware
the high-bridged nose, tell-tale overbrow,
nervous tic, passed on, another drink.
Be careful of early memory loss,
a tendency to think the safety’s on
when it never is. Beware the microscopic,
rod-shaped bodies that define our lives,
the invisible imprint, delayed image passed on,
coming into focus late.
Universal Table: Finding the We in Them, the Us in You
.
.
|
