“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity," wrote T.S. Eliot. For those who need an outlet for creativity during self-isolation and social distancing, Lit Cleveland is offering free writing challenges each week via our newsletter. The following piece is a response to the "This is not that kind of poem" prompt.
A Scar and a Souvenir
by Kevin Hoskinson
Some poems avoid you
and don’t bring a warm blanket
or soft sunrise at the end
just a reckoning of sorts
In Maple Grove Cemetery
off Darrow Road in Vermilion, Ohio
stands an infant graveyard
a garden of dead babies
growing little headstones
I visit a brother here
Ricky Lee
who appeared and disappeared
on October 12, 1955
We would have been three brothers
five-year-old, Ronald, already here
then middle Ricky
me three years later
He was the first 4th family member
whose spot I now hold
He, the limb sawed from the tree
the phantom branch
under which I grew
So a birth, a death, a funeral, a grave
but no grief here
Just a sack of question marks
a future tense trapped in a past
a peculiar scar and souvenir
with no substance
but this rectangular rock at my feet
the family ghost
I picture my mother and father:
dinner table talk
about the new life to come
The crib where Ronald first slept
brought out and repainted
the wooden rocking-horse in my basement now
passed down to Ricky before me
As my mother’s belly swelled
Dad would work extra shifts at the mill
to pay for monthly check-ups with doctors
who smoked in their offices
all in preparation for a grand appearance
a terrible joke with a grim ending
We never become a family of five
with a middle child to contend with
did not get to be both poorer
and richer
yet today I live
indebted to him and dead-ended in him:
the lynchpin between oldest and youngest boy
gone in a death certificate
burdening and bonding us in absentia
So wherefore your non-being, Ricky?
Would you have been a curious child—
a taker-apart of clocks, toasters, gear parts?
Maybe an athlete in football pads
homecoming king with pretty girlfriends
overachiever in the middle
needing to be noticed—
or an army recruit in a military haircut?
A hippie in a tie-dye and sandals?
I pause over your stone today
see the three of us
hanging out in the sun on your patio
with beers and you at the grill
pool table and dart board in your basement
because in my mind you’d be the host
the brother
we both weren’t
but wish we were
Maybe you’d have kids, grandkids
a marriage that held together
or not
Of course, you might be none of that
a chronic junkie in and out of rehab or jail
is just as possible
But we’d have learned from you
and you from us
if you could have stayed a while
before heading straight into the void
buried here and still not mentioned
Anyway, a new, sinister reaper
65 years after you left
comes now with its own reckoning
of graves not yet dug
Time for me to go
I hear a man on a tractor
mowing somewhere behind me
over the dead who
never die all the way
& end up in poems like this
