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sharon scholl |
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Sharon Scholl, Ph.D., is professor emeritus at Jacksonville University (FL) where she taught humanities and non-Western studies. She has three published poetry collections: Unauthorized Biographies, All Points Bulletin, and Message on a Branch. She lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida near her daughters and grandchildren. |
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Forever fixed,
their gazes solemn, antic,
self-possessed, they stare out
like insects from their pins
into the eyes of later, curious
generations. Their labeled names
grow dim; their penned descriptions
fade into oblivion.
Assorted specimens
gathered lavishly, elegantly
preserved like dried flesh
bouquets pulled from storage drawers,
lovingly displayed to the rattle
of tea cups and a slowly circulating
magnifying glass.
Knob-kneed boys
in short pants - grandfathers
ten times over (recently deceased).
The class vamp, smoke curling
from her nostrils, now wrinkled
as a turtle, gasping for breath.
The obligatory mother and child
posed in the open doorway
of a house now gone to landfill
and chimney soot.
Objects of incredulity
stuck there in a crack of time,
sad sentinals caught in mid-flight
on that swift passage
from flesh to dust.
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Like two velvet pillows
my small brown legs
straddled the starch-white thighs
of grown-up laps.
Their skins revealed
like tracing paper
every shattered vein,
each dimpled glob of fat,
their figured dermascape
of moles and wrinkles.
My legs, smooth
as chocolate milk,
were tanned by sun
from endless days spent
roaming creek sides,
scaling trees.
Theirs stayed white
from hose and trousers,
curtained windows,
the dark spaces under desks.
I never knew they bought the brown
as surely as the shorts
they dressed me in.
I never understood they paid
for my days that edged
so gently into twilight,
summer rising over me
like a green umbrella.
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I am thinking now of cousins
passed upon the street unrecognized,
aunts I've not seen since I was two,
a father who lives in scribbled longhand,
a nephew whose freckles are only
photographic. My brother's voice
a stranger's on the telephone,
a niece who writes of her divorce
to names that she assumes might care,
a mother whose distant life reads
like a Martian chronicle, and I am
wondering if blood is thinner
than it used to be.
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