Back home for a holiday,
watching smudged approximations
of former special
occasions on television
as magnetic tape slithers—
unspooling and recoiling away
inside its thirty-year-old
VHS case—I'm wondering
if blurry is even the right word
to describe what it is I—
and mom and dad
and Jeffery—are seeing.
I don't remember being there
that time I turned seven
and the ice cream cake's candles
proved too tricky for me to handle
any more than they can
seem to recall plotting it, snickering,
and bearing witness. And yet,
here it is (albeit dark and a
bit fuzzy): proof positive
that it happened; that it was brutal
and savage—and that, still, somehow
the dispassionate world
kept on turning.
But I can't help but figure
that, if he were here, my tight-lipped
old Grandpa would remember
operating all of those arcane controls,
forcing his one good eye
into the uncomfortably
hot rubber socket
of a cumbrous state-of-the-art machine,
and proceeding to achieve
his cold sober objective—like
it was yesterday.
