Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems

Voices tumble out of the woods
Children escape staid picnic tables
Spread in the proper meadow
Where aunts and uncles rest
Some quietly napping
While the fairies and elves
Dragons and witches
Reign supreme nearby

Photographs' mat and glossy candor
Capture romance and banality
Possibility and disappointment
Kept in thick black pages
None too carefully by aging aunts
Whose siblings beat them to heaven
So they maintained the family history
As best they could for dwindling
Survivors who no longer knew
Who the proud people were in front
Of the wooden store somewhere
In Acadian Canada before the
Moves to Massachusetts
And Rhode Island

In a mixture of late day
And early evening
A cloud hangs by
An island in the distance
As if waiting for a call
By a confused umpire
About time’s direction
As if it made a difference
In this moment

I am inescapably human
My being the only ground
From which I perceive myself
See the ten thousand things
I speak from where I stand
Science pushes day to day chaos
Into engineered probabilities
The sun rises and sets
My car starts so I go to work
God may or may not be waiting
If I chose to posit him
In a leap of faith
Or chose the simple joy
Of being here in this day

I did not know my father
Just a couple of pictures
Where curly hair and glasses
Stare into the camera
Next to him my mother holds me
Before she threw him out
After he threatened to hit me
In an effort to begin his career
As the abused son of a drunk
Much later his new wife
Had a son whose
Existential paranoia
Did not prevent him from
Positing the “old man’s” defense
After I got in contact with his father
Who had come east from Michigan
On his motorcycle to see a dying man
He had not spoken to in fifty years
In a New Bedford hospital
I chose not to visit Michigan
Since I had long ago
Become my very own father