Home Movies: a Sort of Ode

Home Movies: A Sort of Ode Mary Jo Salter

Because it hadn't seemed enough, after a while, to catalogue more Christmases, the three-layer cakes ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard Billy took a shovel to, Phil's lawnmower tour of the yard, it's the re-run surprise the tree forts, the shoot-'em-ups of the unshuttered, prefab blanks between the boys in new string ties of windows at the back of the house, and cowboy hats and holsters, and how the lines of aluminum or Mother sticking a bow as big siding are scribbled on with meaning as Mouseketeer ears in my hair, only for us who lived there; it's the pair of elephant bookends my father sometimes turned the gaze I'd forgotten, with the upraised trunks of his camera to subjects more like handles, and the books they meant artistic or universal: to carry in one block to a future long closeups of a rose's face; that scattered all of us. a real-time sunset (nearly an hour); what surely were some brilliant autumn And look: it's the stoneware mixing bowl leaves before their colors faded figured with hand-holding dancers to dry beige on the aging film; handed down so many years a great deal of pacing, at the zoo, ago to my own kitchen, still by polar bears and tigers caged, valueless, unbroken. Here he seemed to say, like him. she's happy, teaching us to dye the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian What happened between him and her urn of sorts near which—a foster is another story. And just as well child of silence and slow time we have no movie of it, only myself—I smile because she does some unforgiving scowls she gave and patiently await my turn. through terrifying, ticking silence when he must have asked her (no sound track) for a smile. Still, what I keep yearning for isn't those generic cherry blossoms at their peak, or the brave daffodil after a snowfall,