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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I<br>“I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!” <br>That’s how I threw cold water <br>on my Mother and Father’s <br>watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. <br>... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound.... <br>Nowhere was anywhere after a summer <br>at my Grandfather’s farm. <br>Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, <br>its alley of poplars <br>paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden <br>to a scary stand of virgin pine, <br>scrub, and paths forever pioneering. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>One afternoon in 1922, <br>I sat on the stone porch, looking through <br>screens as black-grained as drifting coal. <br>Tockytock, tockytock <br>clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, <br>slung with strangled, wooden game. <br>Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. <br>One of my hands was cool on a pile <br>of black earth, the other warm <br>on a pile of lime. All about me </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>were the works of my Grandfather’s hands: <br>snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; <br>his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; <br>stogie-brown beams; fools’-gold nuggets; <br>octagonal red tiles, <br>sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; <br>a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, <br>its legs, shellacked saplings. <br>A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn <br>fished with a broom straw in a basin <br>hollowed out of a millstone. <br>Like my Grandfather, the décor <br>was manly, comfortable, <br>overbearing, disproportioned. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? <br>It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie <br>bearing pitchers of ice-tea, <br>oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, <br>and the jug of shandygaff, <br>which Grandpa made by blending half and half <br>yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. <br>The farm, entitled Char-de-sa <br>in the Social Register, <br>was named for my Grandfather’s children: <br>Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. <br>No one had died there in my lifetime ... <br>Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy <br>paralyzed from gobbling toads. <br>I sat mixing black earth and lime. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>II<br>I was five and a half. <br>My formal pearl gray shorts <br>had been worn for three minutes. <br>My perfection was the Olympian <br>poise of my models in the imperishable autumn <br>display windows <br>of Rogers Peet’s boys’ store below the State House <br>in Boston. Distorting drops of water <br>pinpricked my face in the basin’s mirror. <br>I was a stuffed toucan <br>with a bibulous, multicolored beak. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>III<br>Up in the air <br>by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, <br>lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, <br>my Great Aunt Sarah <br>was learning Samson and Delilah. <br>She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, <br>with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, <br>accordionlike yet soundless. <br>It had been bought to spare the nerves <br>of my Grandmother, <br>tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, <br>now needing a fourth for “Auction,” <br>and casting a thirsty eye <br>on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix <br>from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Forty years earlier, <br>twenty, auburn headed, <br>grasshopper notes of genius! <br>Family gossip says Aunt Sarah <br>tilted her archaic Athenian nose <br>and jilted an Astor. <br>Each morning she practiced <br>on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, <br>deathlike in the off-season summer— <br>its naked Greek statues draped with purple <br>like the saints in Holy Week.... <br>On the recital day, she failed to appear. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>IV<br>I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor <br>on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. <br>What in the world was I wishing? <br>... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... <br>A fluff of the west wind puffing <br>my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, <br>troubling the waters.... <br>As small as sapphires were the ponds: Quittacus, Snippituit, <br>and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,” <br>where my Uncle’s duck blind <br>floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. <br>Double-barreled shotguns <br>stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. <br>A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak <br>was quacking to the decoys.... </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>At the cabin between the waters, <br>the nearest windows were already boarded. <br>Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. <br>As if posed for “the engagement photograph,” <br>he was wearing his severe <br>war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. <br>Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, <br>tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. <br>Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, <br>was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. <br>La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga <br>was accepting the arm of her “protector,” <br>the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. <br>The pre-war music hall belles <br>had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, <br>and coils of hair like rooster tails. <br>The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts <br>being bushwhacked on the veldt— <br>They were almost life-size.... </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. <br>“You are behaving like children,” <br>said my Grandfather, <br>when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters, <br>and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ... <br>I cowered in terror. <br>I wasn’t a child at all— <br>unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina <br>in the Golden House of Nero.... <br>Near me was the white measuring-door <br>my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights. <br>In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet. <br>While I sat on the tiles, <br>and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse, <br>Uncle Devereux stood behind me. <br>He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. <br>His face was putty. <br>His blue coat and white trousers <br>grew sharper and straighter. <br>His coat was a blue jay’s tail, <br>his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle. <br>He was animated, hierarchical, <br>like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press. <br>He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.... <br>My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles <br>of earth and lime, </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=507811" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>a black pile and a white pile.... <br>Come winter, <br>Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Robert+Lowell">Robert Lowell</a></strong></div>