ODE Poem: Grandfather Pines, by John Foster Robinson

I don’t remember your voice.
Only twenty good photographs sheathed from the box,
displace your face, mostly a distant mystery—
the wide brow in sunlight or distorted darkness of deep-set eyes.
A camera’s blurred lens creates the shadow I cannot lighten.
Your sleeves were buttoned at cuff, or rolled,
though always tucked and proper,
clothes to fit occasions, farm or social, each the same.
You were so at ease among family,
laughter sometimes consumed your face, broke the stone-like illusion
of austerity that these images endow upon the mind.
You still intrigue me after all the years that lie between these pictured thoughts of ink.

I was five or six when you died, vague memories unforgotten,
images, gestures; grandma reaching into the casket for
my father’s father, who planted twelve pines
of mystic shape, even as some had scoffed.
There were places among hill-rocks of the house whose
boards were made from trees of this very land.
Match-box cars made tiny roads,
diamond glints of sandstone— imagined treasure my Tonka hauled.
You let me climb to the wood’s edge,
not as far as ridges, shallow caves or cliff ledges,
and your eyes could see my every move.
Though you would often only grin, sometimes I made you laugh.

There is not much I can know of you except through other people.
You left no journal, no thoughts, only catalogs of cattle sales,
store receipts and timber logs in forty-three;
tools, farm clothes, the few coins your sweat allowed.
What can I learn of you in photographs without forensic attitudes—
only how your face had changed, pieces of your character
through time revealed in subtle gestures now and then;
how you held your mother’s hand, the anger, mystery sometimes your eyes convey.
Tobacco-jawed beside a gutted buck hung in a tree,
another has your arms crossed, leaned back on
split pieces, wood you cut in summer heat;
one, with down-cast eyes, you break into a smile or rifle back a sleep-eyed leer.

I can’t remember your voice.
You exist in a place of half-mystery,
alluring unrecorded thoughts that question:
what have I imposed on things that I have seen
in this questionable space of black and white,
incomparable with fact or fixed brick in a world beyond knowledge?
The myth I made of your memory
was like a mirror of my own beliefs.
I realized, perhaps, even you had those flaws from years ago,
a lesser shade of hate, though I told myself you were just like me.
The seven-circle pattern of your infant’s gown creates a flower’s image.
You let me climb and climb and climb.

Dirt-worn boots tell their own about your work,
your life from day to day in pasture fields.
I could only wish the dust of life to cling to me the same.
Let me not forget this face and remember my true name.
All I have is a reasoned voice restrained.
Among the rows of books and thought
that were far away as dream.
I have your eyes to see your eyes,
to keep life here, ‘dream of the sky,’
and climb, and climb, and climb,
to find a solitary, untouchable way, that place horizon-level,
the center of this created universe.

Only photographs replace your voice with images;
Grandfather Pines that always stand
over oak and maple, along any ridge you turn your eyes to see.
They stand in rusted shade along umber paths
that trace this land through ridge-pocket rocks of malachite green,
where spring-house waters run creek to creek,
through briar thatch and rabbit bores, on grouse-wing
over each sedge-rung hollow’s hill-side where calls of owls remind me
of the place where you exist, as every night
I hear you, every night, your song rises through the fullness
of three seasons, through coldness of the winter into spring,
in me, your voice, climbs, and climbs, and climbs