Grandfather Long the Last Time

Abstract

Grandfather Long the Last Time 1. THE FRONT PORCH GLIDER Back and forth the glider heaves our strange bodies, eighty-eight and twenty-four, your head swaying on its stem like a balding dandelion: eyes almost frosted over, throat whiskers roothair-white, you smell of mildew and ammonia --Is this the God-haired evangelist whose supper prayer was as big as a circus tent? who painted himself arm in arm with Dante grinning on a crag in hell while Russian cosmonauts plunged into the lake of fire? Your operatic apocalypse featured a frieze of pink women in flaming bikinis, a blond, musclebound Jesus flanked by Longs in the upper corner of the sky, and a chorus of devils --naked, batfaced, blueskinned--who pitchforked Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. I was six when you bugged out your eyes and gave me that giggle of nightmares: the turpentine hands that gripped my shoulders still had wet blue nails from touching up devils; the voice that boomed Babylon. Belial, Beezlebub, sounded not so much adversary as kennel master summoning his prize hounds. Those names came for me night after night-- why should I love you? Visiting us at the coast you spent one night, then left to paint Revelations: grinning angels pouring vats of fire into the Atlantic off Wrightsville Beach, making it boil with a leaping agony of sailfish, marlin, shark, mackerel and snapper. The vision was clear, even to a boy: to rise, after you, like smoke beaming the face of God, or lie down among oily human kindling. No middle air: either way I would burn. In this leafless Piedmont mildness your brain hardens around ten or twelve memories: nowhere do I appear. You are at a loss for my beard, my ponytail and wool poncho. The hand which shaped its own heaven and hell touches me, hair and cheek, finally tender and thoughtless as the wisteria curling one green finger around the glider's leg. I shout my name, my father's, yours, mine again. Recognize me now? Recognition is not belief. You shake your head. 2. SERMON ON THE KITCHEN STEPS Even the resurrection and life thirsts for something sweeter than a vinegar handkerchief: I fetch orangeade, you convert water to blood, sugar to words, shuffle-waltzing from porch column to column, grabbing the rail just short of a fall to survey the revival-green tent of elms, your last congregation: pigeons bump each other like balcony spinsters in the roof-gutter; starlings whistle offkey hymns; a chameleon collects flywing-tithes --church of a heaven-crazed mind. Handing me the emptied bottle, you tremble as the syrup of prophecy thickens in your throat, each grain of sugar breaking into five thousand fire-words: How these little days stumble along the blood turning to stone in my kidney always in prayer I believed God's steady whisper that I would be favored body like Samson voice like Caruso and the sword of the Spirit shall fall on America when I lead a lion through the streets of Philadelphia the Cardinal shall be saved and hand over three thousand Catholics these shall be the happiest converts hurricane winds and bright coronets of fire annoint them after so much weeping and doubt I prevail I am given America no missiles shall fall on it while I stand in the footprints of Moses pleading for the lost surrounding me full of sorrow and sorrow is the true mother of prayer I swear it to you-- in your bird-dispersing deaf man's shout, in the humility of piss-stained pants on the kitchen steps for Christ's sake I grab your arm and hurry inside. …