tradition

I heard last year Uncle Keat
lost his sight, and nobody
has seen him since.

Tonight, my oldest brother– waiting
on a kidney, unable to walk–
unwraps a flashlight.

A gift of hope, I suppose,
what we lose we tend to replace
at the end of a year–

the longer Dad’s dead the wider
entropy’s net consumes us.

Today’s the fabled white
Christmas, trail of footprints
leading into the woods.

Somebody gray-bearded
and familiar waits in a clearing,
hands cupped to mouth.

There’s no warmth in
red streams of wrapping paper
hanged from winter branches.

Uncle Keat was there,
we’re sure. Somewhere
his tether.

As if another dark
world with open jaw
awaits, and time

pushes us forward,
wheels squeaking
every now and then.

(originally published in Overheard, Winter 2022)

On the way home from my first Passover
with your family we stop at an Olive Garden

in flyover country, where the waitress tells us
Happy Easter and, when you tell her we forgot

but still want angel hair, she jokes her last
table mistook pesto for alfredo. Sometimes

people confuse one god for another but never
their own, and food is ours– Jesus rising

with the dough of endless breadsticks
descending like ten plates of plagues, first-born

bastards in baskets we need no hunt to find
lest our mouths become black holes absorbing

absurd sanctities of tradition. Separately,
the Garden was where our families would gather

on intermittent nights to write our own Haggadahs
or speak sins of rock stars or mysteries

of faith. Afikomans for truth, perhaps, but instead
of matzo an endless bowl of a salad of words

in which we always beg for more
forgiveness without really wanting that.

And the waitress, before engaging the simplest rotor,
asks us to say when to end airstrikes of parmesan

and it does not matter when we do.

(originally published in After the Pause, Summer 2018)

James Croal Jackson