Gaylord Brewer
The Last Time I Saw You
waiting in the crowd
at a seafood restaurant by the river,
I in town to visit my folks,
you with toddler squeezing thigh
and an infant on the other hip
I scarcely recognized you,
so aged and tired and wan
before you turned away.
We’d finished with each other
years before—but not so many—
the lusty thirst we couldn’t quench,
the ugliness at the end
and the even-uglier at the very end.
Why I woke today thinking of you
I’ve no idea, a vague, jumbled
recollection without longing
or forgiveness, apology
or complaint. Now, I am sitting
inside a free hour
in a grove of old walnut trees
chewing a single, sticky Medjool date
warmed in the May sun, tossing
the pit to manicured grass.
Another, and lick the fingers clean.
Beautiful day, early still,
all that remains still to come.
In the distance, my wife’s sensible
car in the sensible sun.
Any moment she will emerge
from our building,
don her rakish shades, tool coolly
toward home, her work finished
as mine’s to begin. She will spy me
in the grove’s shadows,
unfolding memories and folding
them again, or not. You are almost
certainly grandmother by now,
probably by several years.
If we were to meet today
you, I’m certain, would need identify
yourself as the sad, smiling girl
adrift by uncaring parents.
And I, I’m sure, would read
the decades of my aging
in your pale green eyes. Luckily
that won’t happen. It makes
no iota of difference in the world,
nothing plus nothing,
whether I wish you well,
recall you fondly or otherwise,
announce your name, or not.
Gaylord Brewer’s new collection of poetry, his eleventh, is Worship the Pig (Red Hen, 2020). He teaches at Middle Tennessee State University.