Up in that land where bears snore under branches, bellies full of blueberries,
where a ferret in a white fur snowsuit bounces across the fields of fresh snow,
and the heat of its small engine emits bursts of mist from its throat, Uncle
holds in two hands, like a prayer, a white coffee cup full of mirrored
blackness and watches the memories of the day reveal themselves there.
Today the image of Linda Krachek’s smile, her two front teeth, slightly crossed
like Snow White’s folded hands, gleam as she sets down his breakfast special:
two eggs overeasy, two strips of bacon, and one buttered toast, cut into
triangles, with a packet of blueberry jam. He is Man of the Northstar Grill,
her eyes flash emeralds. Whenever she looked into his own,
they held him tight.
A ferret jumps in and out of sight.
His niece, his Mouse with rat-nest hair, the one unafraid of delivering earthworms
and leeches to the old fools who fished all day in sun or rain. She who hugged him
as if he were a Hero of the Great North, as if he were Paul Bunyan himself. She left
years ago, in awkward puberty, when Uncle became a person to smile at briefly
on her way to the bedroom before closing the door. Last he’d heard she lived in China.
He imagines her elf face darkening into a sunset, like a cinnamon stick in black tea,
and on each finger, a leech is twisting like the fingernails of an ancient Chinese empress.
A ferret jumps, switches directions midair, leaps and tumbles.
Little brother, Mouse’s father. His laugh would crack across ice like lightening bolts.
People crowded around him, their messiah of mirth. Uncle Bud nearby in the shadow,
older, the other brother, the fumbler, whose jokes fell like geese full of buckshot. Best friend, comrade in frost and fish, a right-hand man, to the one who fell in a lake and fell silent.
Brother underground for forty years, Linda married, then divorced, sitting under a thinning quilt, TV on, for twenty-eight, Mouse a wisp of a memory, lost in an adult shell. Here Uncle is, King
of Memories. We were wordless when we posed before his Polaroid, but he knew. He gave unencumbered love, and for that, we stay near on winter mornings. We hang like crystal from the window ledge, immortal beauties he cannot reach or save.
