Len Roberts

My Uncle Chauncey
drove my Aunt Eleanor 

over two-hundred miles every day because
she had Alzheimer's, couldn't remember
where she was, where she had been, and
had to see the elephants in the zoo again,
stop in to see her friend Rose
for the third day in a row.  When
they left the house he had his teeth
clenched deep in his jaw, she
was smiling, sixteen again, bowing
to swoop up the tall-stemmed tulips,
oooing and aaahing as she looked into
the yellow and red, ripping the petals
off in puffs of circus colors just
before she skipped the rest of the way
down the walk.  Sometimes she'd called
him Pete or William, or some other
man's name, and hold his hand a way
she had never held his hand, and
Chauncey would get jealous although
he was sixty-two and knew her mind
was riddled with time like the rotten
oak log in his back yard the carpenter
ants had eaten their way through.  Holding
the car door for her to slide in, he'd shout,
Who's Bill, and who in hell are Merrill
and Ray, What in hell have you
been doing all these years?, but she'd
just bend over to ask in that low, sweet voice
that had so recently come back, if he would
please peel out the way he used to, leave smouldering
tracks by the yellow curb in front of their house. 

The Trouble-Making Yellow Finch

A yellow finch is in
the juniper pfitzers,
raising hell for such
a bird-runt, branches
springing yesterday's
snows all over the place,
prisms arcing from his
small yellow wings, 
his stirring orange feet,
and I see now this 
trouble-maker who
disturbs the noon
day's stillness
is my father tap-
dancing on Boney's bar
until he stumbles
and falls off
into another
lover’s arms,
her blue sweater
and tight black
slacks, a beehive of hair
that buzzes when he sets
a red carnation among 
the strands, the finch
down there making a racket
worse than my father's 
harmonica playing when
he was drunk, crumpling
into snow banks on the way
home without losing a beat,
the tune an after-midnight
whine that made the neighbors
turn on their lights and
hang their heads from cold
windows to shout Shut up
or Turn it off, the warbler
of Olmstead Street throwing
snowballs until the cops
would come and tuck him
into their car and take
him to his other home,
his absence then
startling
as the finch's when
I look down to curse
him again only to find
him gone, the small
wings and maddening beak,
the somersaulter
among needled twigs
who had disturbed my peace
and brought my dead father
back with his showing-off-
zipping around and
foolishness, 
his brief yellow streaks,
his fraction-of-an-ounce heart.


AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW/

Anointing Her Five Senses

Each morning she'd
drop a Milky Way or Three 
   Musketeer,
with some piece of fruit,
apple, plum, peach, pear,
the twenty feet between
us nothing but blue
   air
as we'd both wait that
   split-
second to see if I'd
   catch
what was tossed with
my free hand, not missing 
   once,
as I remember it, reaching
out, sure, even now when
   the priest asks
Are there any sick in your
   house?
and dabs her head with the
   sign
of the cross, the last
putting on of oil for 
her closed eyes and
   stitched lips, 
for her ears that had
curled to every word
   I'd  whispered
up those cool 6 a.m.'s
just above the rattle of 
cars down cobblestones,
a dab, too, for her nose
   that could tell     
exactly when the cake was
   done,
chocolate thick in layers
she'd wrapped in cellophane 
just once for our most dangerous
   toss,
small cardboard plate
like a flying saucer that
   zagged
the air but never once
   turned
upside down, shining 
there in my palm
like this chrism
   smudged
on the tip of her nose
with the priest's words
To heal the body and soul
   of the sick,
my eyes risen still to   
   that window
where she would sit,   
   my hands half-
lifted in that small room
   of her death
to catch, again, her morning         
   gift.      


For S.R., 1898-1973

 Poetry Northwest
 In book: The Trouble-Making Finch
and NEW & SELECTED

© All Copyright, Len Roberts.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission. 

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