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The
Shoebox
Except poem from The Nowhere Steps
Photograph by Rick Klauber
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I finally broke down and opened the shoebox
which arrived just weeks after my father died.
All winter I had put it out of sight on top
of the bookshelves where I wouldn’t be tempted.
The box was not, as I would have expected,
stuffed with photographs, but packets,
wallet-sized, each with a dozen
"snaps," each sequence a kind of story,
and I couldn’t have predicted how they would spring out
once I removed the rubber bands
wound tight as bowstrings around the top—
too late now to put them back,
to stop what I had set in motion—
there is no love in them, only
a memorializing will.
A predictable cast, my father’s five
older sisters, their several (only three
between them!) issue.
It wasn’t that everyone looked demented,
those spinster aunts, those whiz kid cousins,
but that no one looked like they wanted
to be where they were, in that parking lot fronting the beach,
in front of that penny arcade or movie marquee,
clutching that bulging suitcase….
Only one glossy found its way into the box,
the only shot not taken with my father’s Minolta:
a puppet without strings, no,
a ventriloquist's dummy, all shocked innocence—
me, glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, plenty of space
between my teeth, dangling above
my father, a rotund, baby-faced, leering man,
and his mother, a slack-jawed, toothless old woman,
greedily gazing up at the child as if she were its mother….
The passersby on Times Square look happy
in a miserable sort of way.
In the mid-fifties laissez-faire seems
to extend everywhere except the family.
I plucked the images I didn’t like
but when, after a few hours,
I tried to stuff the slender packets back
and close the box, even with half
of the photographs smoking in the wood stove,
they wouldn’t smash down, the rubber bands
would not stretch beyond the limit
they had held for a decade,
yet I if I was to sleep, to have peace,
the box had to be shut.
The top had to fit snug around the edges.
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Short
Reviews of
The Nowhere Steps
“The aphorisms [in The Nowhere Steps]recede in one reading, jump out in the next. The whole form itself is constantly shifting, alive, changing before one’s eyes. The reading experience, if disconnecting, is exhilarating at the same time. Rudman’s work has to be read with that formal urgency always present . . . The level of achievement of Rudman’s poems is impressive.”
– Linda Orr, Agni Review
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> Click here to purchase The Nowhere Steps
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