A Wake in the House
Traveling the worldof my Grandpapa's stone house
through the hallways and twilight rooms,
from the brightly-lit kitchen
where the men, sitting at the table
or standing around the stove
with work shirt sleeves rolled up,
drank Grandpapa's red wine
and played brisc at the table,
getting so tipsy they were not able
to stand up steady on their feet
or meet the tactical demands
of the Naples deck's Batons and Cups,
because they themselves
were deeply in their cups;
and those standing around
playing morra with stiff fingers,
the nails grimed from railroad work,
found it hard just to stand up
with "Three Feathers" sticking
in their upraised hair.
Someone had brought "Three Feathers,"
as careful thought
to help out in this moment of distress.
The brisc players drank the wine;
the rest were content with whiskey,
a ready standby for working morra—
to the dim-lit parlor where the women,
chief among them my Grandmama,
tall, regal woman of Modina,
said by all who knew her
to have the dreaded portal
necessary to talk intimately
with the dead.
I was seven then, the first-lived son,
grandson, the first of the first
generation in America,
the apple of all family eyes,
the darling of all Mamma Mias
in the neighborhood.
My travels through the house all night
were prompted by my loneliness,
going from kitchen to parlor, then
back again to the kitchen and the men;
prompted also by the strange condition
of what was going on in the parlor room.
There, my Grandmama sat dressed in black
with a black veil covering her face;
with all my Zias, the seven daughters
of my Grandpapa, beside her in a row,
sobbing now and then and fingering
the worn beads of mended rosaries.
Their quiet sobbing, broken now
and again whenever someone,
a visitor, a neighbor or a friend,
came through the parlor door
and embraced my Grandmama—
broken with shrill wails, great cries
by everyone, the Zias, the visitors,
but most of all by my Grandmama
whose wails and cries outsounded all.
Then, quiet again after the visitor
went to see my Grandpapa asleep
in the coffin bed set up against a wall
and found a place to sit in the sobbing row;
only to have the wails and cries repeat
when another came through the parlor door.
At only seven, I wondered why the piercing cries
did not wake up my Grandpapa
from his deep sleep; why he did not
demand his own brisc hand,
or ask my father for a glass of red
or sit bolt upright in his coffin bed.
And so I traveled through the darkened
rooms and hallways of the house
in search of something that I didn't know,
going from the wailing parlor
with the women dressed in black
to the bright kitchen where the men
spent hours playing brisc,
spent hours playing morra,
spent hours drinking whiskey,
spent hours drinking my Grandpapa's
concord-tokay red wine until I
came to dimly understand at last
why my Grandpapa,
set safely in the parlor,
slept so soundly that the sounds
of wails, crying, sobs,
and of men drinking,
playing morra and brisc,
never disturbed him from his sleep,
never bothered him at all.
