Poem: January 18, 2019

I'm Wavy, You're Alf

Dad gave me a photograph a few years back,
and I rediscovered it today in the back cover
of a book of poetry. It was a black and white
picture of his grandfather and great uncle,
Wavy and Alf, when, I would guess they were
a little bit younger than we are now- two guys,
late 30's playing guitar, sitting on wooden
folding chairs in the yard outside the farmhouse
that I remember my great-grandmother lived in
until she had reached her late 90's.

I remember she grew rhubarb and green beans
in the garden outside her kitchen
where we would eat on weekends
when we would come to visit from town.
I remember her furniture, a time capsule-
the shimmering red and chrome of the kitchen chairs,
the imposing expanse of the burgundy couch
that looked like gangster movies to me,
the rifle rack above the guest bed behind the curtain,
the door that shut away the front of the house
where Great watch Lawrence Welk on Saturdays,
the brittle pages of the calendar forgotten on the wall.

I remember playing outside on warm days,
fascinated by a world so unlike my own,
expansive and dusty. The gravel road and the fields,
the smoke house, the shallow well with its iron pump,
the barn, riddled with holes, where they hung tobacco.
It's strange to me that this picture includes
the same yard, the bushes I remember. It might
have only been taken forty or fifty years before
my visits. It's strange that people I didn't know
told stories or jokes, lived lives that I can only see
in a form that is black and white and fading.

Consider that it is amazing that this picture
was taken at all. Two guys playing their guitars
sometime in the 1930's, maybe 40's, I imagine
after church, and passing the time before dinner.
Who held the camera and decided this scene
was worth saving? Wavy and Alf, in their white
short-sleeved dress shirts, working through
the mechanics of a song. What happened
to those guitars? What song would they have sung?

And that's what made me think about you
and me and the hours we've spent, guitar
and harmonica, lyrics and harmonies,
making music as a form of conversation
with no reason, really, for anyone to take our picture,
but now I wish they would. I wish they would
capture this moment, you and I around a table,
working a song like homemade dough.
Imagine someone printing that photo
and taking the time to write our names on the back.
Imagine one day, that person's grandchild
sliding our picture from the album, reading
our names and wondering how lives
are defined by our furniture, our clothing,
the way we draw our water from the well.
Imagine them examining the broken path
that connects them to the past.