My grandfather was a god to me, bronzed
from secret Ashkenazi blood and tattooed
with the scars of a workingman’s life.
Mechanical things perceived his supremacy
and did as he bid. Midas-like, he could transform
trash into treasure, turned Goodwill garbage
into a golden dresser graced with brass lion heads
the size of quarters biting the rings of the drawer pulls.
With his own hands, he built a house for his wife,
the pine door frames bleeding the resinous sap
of their marriage for years on end.
He rose from the hard-packed earth
of immigrant Milwaukee, an elm sapling
growing as beautiful as he was sturdy.
In the attic he shared with his brothers,
I see him breaking the glassy skin of ice
atop a chipped china bowl, mornings,
to splash glacial water on his callow cheeks.
It was so cold, he would said, with every telling,
you could see the frost on the heads of the nails,
which glinted, I imagine, like constellations
of frozen stars he could touch, so close
he was, always, to heaven.
First published in Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Summer 2019; reprinted in my Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (Terrapin Books, 2020)
Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov (Russia), Bellingham Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her published poems are currently being sold individually in two vending machines in Chicago to raise money for the nonprofit organization Arts Alive Chicago. She was recently nominated for the newly created position of Chicago Poet Laureate. She is also the author of the historical novel Infraction and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. She is retired from the University of Chicago Press, where she was a manuscript editor.
