It’s an old red and blue thing.
Very ugly, objectively speaking.
Yet it belonged to grandpa,
and you wore it with panache,
drunk and ready to rumble.
We played cards and you spoke
quietly to people around your
end of the table, and you
elicited tattered laughter
from family and strangers.
I felt something boiling underneath,
like how I imagine poison
and bile mix together in blood.
Our sister laughed long and loud,
and she smacked the table violently
with the flat of her hand.
My stomach was upset,
and I looked up from my cards.
A secret was in the river,
and the next hand flopped hard
the whole way round.
A woman in her 30s
turned toward me and and asked,
“But don’t you want to sleep with me?”
My 16-year-old stomach churned.
Later,
I stood on the porch and
cried as a bottle of beer with legs
smiled slyly and the fleshy
pulp of that wound lay foul. I felt
that being stabbed in the heart
at such a young age
wasn’t necessary.
I was no longer a ride along,
but I was a babysitter,
and some people needed your
labor more than your company.
Yet, much like all of the mistakes
of our past, we are supposed to know
better now, even though we didn’t
right then in those days.
I was an annoying asshole
based on my level of usefulness.
In mere months I would wonder
about this moment as I lay
flat on my back in a pole barn
deflated by a bottle of brandy.
*
The smoking jacket was blue and red,
and I had never seen such a thing
before and have spent fifteen years
searching for a proper one
with leather elbows.
On that day, as I toyed with a wooden toggle
on its front, I thought how cool it would be
to wear it, and so I tried it on in the bathroom
and saw my reflection.
I was not my grandpa, but a kid in
a vivaciously lively sweater.
How does one wear something with panache?
Meanwhile, I looked like a toddler
in a business suit.
*
I ran at you full force that week,
and you ducked and grabbed me
and we tussled and fought.
This was a violent time in our lives,
and I can see the face of my father.
On your front porch an hour later,
we talked in tears, but that wound
never healed in either of us.
We apologized to one another,
the smoking jacket a memory.
Quiet filled the car to the brim.
*
Going home at the end of summer
was tough, and my parents knew
now that I had to sneak over there
to see you. My father, staring at the wall,
as was his custom, spoke of betrayal
in a haze of cigarette smoke.
“They can’t be trusted, and neither can you.”
I now know if you deal in absolutes,
then it is in fact you who can’t be trusted.
But I didn’t know then what I know now,
but somehow I was expected to understand.
My mother, meanwhile, silently washed the dishes.
*
The smoking jacket only exists in memory.
Lost in some far off place,
tattered and dampened,
the blue and red duller and duller.
Style and shade merely a shard
of what it once was.
Maybe somebody is wearing it now,
and maybe not–maybe it’s in the dump
collecting pounds of trash,
just like the memories it amassed.
Every once in a while, though,
I’ll wake up in the shock of darkness,
thinking about that smoking jacket,
and how you wore it with flair
on some far off evening.
Like its vivid colors, I think,
I wish some memories would fade.
