The dew collects, but that smell;
that smell is everything I know.

Brings me, to days of summer camp,
fresh laundry hung on the patio, across
the wire line, clothespins my grandmother
swore by, she called it a veranda.

I got confused: balcony, patio, veranda;
what's the difference? She never explained.
Just cooked and cooked her old-school soul.

Chicken soup, Italian meatballs, sauce, always!
Oh the sauce, this frail – deceptively – old woman
always paying cold attention, while you're distracted.

Watching you with her blind-eye, in the back of her mind
never letting you slide, beating you with a shoe, if you do.
Her gray hair tinted with chestnut, fooling the old fogies.

When she was forty she was picture-perfect, with minks
and men swooning for her, she scoffed. Her best nature;
Only the best; Here I am; It's me Nanny; Well-done

-Everything - I remember as my mother at-a-distance,
teaching me in the ways-of-old, where I learned my
old-fashioned -just so- mentality; slightly obsessed.

But what you gonna do, she's my frickin grandmother.
Italian to the last bone, the last cooked food, her last breath.
I won't forget her that easily; she lives in my memory; through me.

12/22/2009

Posted on 02/24/2010
Copyright © 2025 Michael Defries