Money

My father and I argue over money – his loss,
my lack.  We’re cordial, but furious,
angry over the way it’s become love’s broken shoe,
the hobble that keeps us from going far.
neither of us gives in; each has a picture
of failure stuck in his brain.  He remembers
his own father lighting kerosene lamps in the tenant house
they fled to when the Depression came;
I know what it’s like when you’re sick and the cash runs out.

In my mother’s family, money sometimes killed.
At the reading of my grandfather’s will,
Where the children learned the farm had passed to the brother
who stayed home, my oldest uncle reeled in a rage
out of the house, caught a heart attack
like a hardball in the chest, and died.
My mother, who lost her mind twenty years ago,
Sometimes calls this brother’s name,
As if he’s alive and they are children;
you can see how happy she’d be
if he walked into the room, sunny in the face,
as she remembers him, like a breeze
blown in by summer rain.  The rest,
for her is inexplicable.

-Charlie Smith-