AFTER LIFE
will ties of kinship
mark us
like scar tissue tracks the deep
blade a surgeon slid next
to the spinal cord--carving out the known
tumor, shoving nerves
aside--not even an outward
bulge at the site, just a pink divide
knit back to look like one
body, while within
a persistent ache, deep in the middle of your back
pulses, present, always present-
yet fails
to exclude, keep others at bay,
the way a surname once
sufficed? Such
recognition
might dawn like the realization
that the bulbous-nosed, rosacea-strewn
woman with the starved hair
sitting in your mother's
big pink chair, white piles
of kleenex stuffed
down her bosom remains tied to you
through her marriage to your great
Uncle Jack--the gambler
who lived off local bankers, politicians,
those high flying optimists
who foolishly ignored his prodigious memory
for a card's face--allowed him
steady income one night a week--
one ample banker good for 8
grand a year. My father knew
the guy's name. They
played in a back room at the Read House
where the Babe
stayed the night he ate
too many dogs at Joe Engel's
Stadium--got sick
as one. Great
Uncle Jack
sold typewriters, dropped
dead walking up that steep
second street hill the doc
told him not
to pull. Once
my grandmother, sweet Margie,
went to visit her
big sister in NYC, saw her brother, Jack
on the sidewalk, some woman wasn't
his wife on his arm. Jack
strolled right on by,
winked. Perhaps the after
life is like that.
Some folks come to us without
ties. My
little sister never spoke, am-
bulated, got
house-broke or out
of diapers. She laughed
and cried enough
but never attached herself
to anyone in particular. We hefted,
bathed, fed, cradled, rocked, dressed
played, avoided, walked, turned her
over, around, upside down
day and night for ten
years. She
perpetually open
to the after-life
and any other kind that shifted
her way.
So you think you're gonna meet
your husband in heaven and take up
where you left off? A quick salute,
the certain end to a long
deployment. Your own
mansion? Maybe you don't realize
you've been struck by lightning, left
standing dead like a tree that will take years
to fall over, much less
send up new green shoots in rain--
if there is rain.
Susan Jones grew up on Signal Mountain and teaches creative writing K-5 at Bright School. She finished her undergraduate degree at UTC and did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Rice University. When she's not teaching, reading, walking or writing, she likes to cook.