We’d just put the old man in the earth

We’d just put the old man in the earth
and come back to drink his whiskey
and eat the neighbors’ casseroles and slaws.

Family drifted through the house,
assessing the bones of his life
for value and portability,
high tones about Jesus and redemption
intercut with low tones about pricing
and estate sales.

My aunt,
the walking,
drinking,
archive & oracle,
beckoned me and the whiskey
to the couch
to be her companion through
pouches and albums
of kodachromes and monochromes.
of weddings and picnics and days at the farm.

Exercising the ways of a wake,
telling all the old stories when a lid closes,
as automatic as the meatloaves and lasagnas.

Generations of pages 
and pages of generations
passed into one half-tinted blur, until
in one photo,
the uncle I never knew
paused at the door of a shed 
I’d never seen.

His lid closed decades ago,
interrupting his own trip,
his own route, hitching
to a different grandfather’s
different funeral.

though in the end they’re all the same

Her fingernail caught on his photo,
slowed just long enough for me to say

“Hey, that’s the Smith’s shed.”

She caught the page’s corner
and flipped us both on past

“No, you don’t know that.”

“It’s not?”

“It is, but they tore it down before - 
They tore, they tore it down
years, years before you were born,
and about, about the time,
about the time he was killed.
You don’t know it. You never saw it.”

The pages fanned through silence,
her fingers grasping for a distraction.

“Sure, I never saw it, but
It was green
and the white trim glowed
a funny way at dusk.
He’d go there
and hide – with booze and books
til dad – til your dad, his dad, 
my granddad, the old man,
the flinty bastard,
tracked him down
and beat him for being useless
and more for being the way he was.

And sometimes
the two of you would talk
in his sanctuary,
so it became yours, too.
But I don’t know that
because he and it and everything
everything died
years before I was born.”

She dripped salt
on a painted postcard
from Garden of the Gods.

“My glass is empty.”

“I know.”

I refilled it.