2. Cousin Dori and Ron the day of Aunt Esther’s Funeral August 2006

Dori’s been through 2 marriages;

the first seemed normal enough,

to Jay, a college professor.

But it ended.  Childless.

And then there was the second, to a rock musician,

who also had been through a previous marriage;

They produced a son together and 

raised him on the milk of

“The Sex Pistols,” and on various forms of

second hand smoke,

causing him to suffer from attention deficit disorder;

he went on meds so he could function in school.

No one could figure out why the first marriage ended

and why the second one lasted as long as it did,

considering the drugs, and that he didn’t work,

and she, a professional,

supported them and bought them a home

in Madison, Wisconsin (which state law gave him half of

and she had to furiously buy him out.)

The eventual disintegration yielded hatred and

disgust from an unforgiving wife and son.

Then in her 50’s she found Ron. 

She was still

long and lanky, with bangs,

but her hair had begun to turn grey.

When I saw her at her mother’s funeral,

the grey had been poorly dyed to a washed-out brown.

She was now 60, and on this day, distraught.

Ron stood by her side. He enveloped her in his arms

making her look small and vulnerable during the funeral service. 

She was.

He rested his arm on the back of the bench and created a niche for her

to take refuge in.  She was like a bird that had fallen

from a nest with an injured wing, without a mother to comfort her.

She yielded to his protection,

his strength, his wholeness.

He pulled her close

never thinking that

she was Jewish and he was Christian,

that she was born in New York, and he was from Minnesota,

that she was a Democrat and he, a Republican.

It mattered not that she was thin, and he was beefy and encompassing.

They were a comfort to one another in the battlefield of opposites.

They balanced, leaned on, supported, nurtured, and fed off

all that they could find positive within their differences.

After the funeral, and a mourning meal in her mother’s back yard,

they stood together, entwined in front of the house,

a house that will soon likely be sold to developers, and demolished.

This was the house where she grew up, that she left for failed marriages,

that she came back to, now, as an orphan.

The moon was rising;

when the pale light touched their faces

it blurred the past into the present,

and cast the solidity of their forms into one large shadow

before them and revealed

what wasn’t clear in the brightness of the sun;

that Ron was only in his 30’s,

and that the long shadow they created,

mirrored the length

of their future.

Magically touching poetry and story, Sue. Reflects the true complexity of lives – and loves. And reflects your perceptive sensitivity too. I love it!