Jamie Grant: Two Poems

Dry Rot

Making conversation while waiting on the tee

I mentioned that I’d been in hospital

with a faulty heart. “Is that all?”

said one of the others. “I am having chemotherapy

for prostate cancer.” “Well, I have got

leukemia,” said another. The third

member of the foursome didn’t utter a word,

so we turned to him. “I would not

go to the doctor. I don’t want to find out

what is wrong with me,” he said.

We each hit a ball into the familiar

green landscape that appeared before us, regular

in its contours as a flowerbed,

a tree-framed vista that survived the spring drought.

 

Leukemia. It was a threat that loomed

over us all, like the creaking, dry-rot-riddled tree limb

above the second tee. It was not only him

who felt its presence: everyone assumed

the disease would return from the remission

that allowed our friend to be on the course,

and that when it did it would be worse.

Playing in a golf competition

distracted him, but there would be times

when he would mention a detail

of his treatment, the weekly blood tests

and plasma transfusions, the sickening side effects,

the wait for transplants that might fail,

the hormones and enzymes.

 

When our friend did not play, we all feared

what his absence might mean—the return

of the adversary within, discerned

in a low blood-count, so, being men, we jeered

and joked about it, trying to lighten

the burden each of us felt. A joke

may not be so amusing, but it broke

the tension that otherwise would tighten

with each message that explained

another absence. For weeks he was not there.

The limb with dry rot broke, and fell

onto the tee. Greens sloped as if an ocean swell

rose under them. White orbs soared into the air.

He had never complained.

 

Jamie Grant

 

 

Beyond Posterity

My aunt, the architect,

left monuments to herself

throughout the district

where we lived, a wealth

 

of great houses, a school,

the church. Could she achieve

immortality through the cool

distinctive

 

form of each brick-built structure?

You’d assume a house would outlast

words on paper, or a picture;

in the past

 

that was the case, of course:

the buildings preserved for the future’s eye,

the monasteries and forts

on the bone-dry

 

hilltops of Spain, the relics

in Rome and Palmyra,

have survived to awe and perplex

tourist and terror

 

group alike over centuries.

Yet as I went

down the street on one of those days

of pleasant

 

autumnal sunlight, and passed

a house the local guide

attributes to my aunt, I noticed

it had been destroyed;

 

a heap of broken stone

was all that remained

of the archways and mezzanine

levels, the shuttered

 

windows in the asymmetric

façade; all of my aunt’s

creation was reduced to brick

dust and bent

 

metal fragments as fragile,

after all, as a sheet

of paper, or a pile

of ashes. The street

 

would not be the same.

Within a matter of weeks

a featureless box had come

to take the place of my aunt’s unique

 

design. More such boxes had grown

nearby. How long would it be

before the church was gone

beyond posterity?

Jamie Grant