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Unwanted House Guest
Why I Garden on My Birthday
Happiness is the Best Revenge
Swingers
Long after the father dies,
long after a son thinks him buried,
every son becomes his father
at the worst possible moment.
Every son yells like his father
because his son has an F in math
and cries at the dinner table.
Every father rises in the son
like a ghost star to take over the son
like night takes over for the day.
Every son has his father’s worst
and his father’s best, but only
his worst ascends in the lungs
when the son needs his best.
Every son who doesn’t know this
becomes his father’s worst
and every son who does know it
still becomes his father’s worst.
Wisdom dies in the gutter
like a muddy rain sludge
creeping toward the sewer.
If any man goes out tonight
after making a fool of himself,
after striking his wife or finding
his daughter’s suicide note,
if he spends a minute smoking
and an hour under the cheap moon
listening to his own breath,
the heartbeat underneath that breath,
in he will hear his drunk father singing
it’s good, it’s good, it’s good,
it’s good to be back.
The Tao says if you have no room for Death
you cannot die. This sounds awfully good,
but as anyone over the age of forty knows
death moves in anyway. He steals the key
and starts carrying in furniture, cancer cells,
plaque for the artery wall, viruses, bacteria,
pulling yours out one piece at a time, a kidney,
gall bladder, uterus, anything not nailed down.
Death may not be able to evict you at will
but he looks for any opening, a knife wound,
a fall in the bathtub, that third donut.
The guest room is bolted, but you find Death
squatting in the pantry, next to the coffee.
Vampires are said to need an invitation
to enter the house, but death wanders in
and puts his feet on the fragile coffee table.
He looks you over, rolling his cigar
in his wide mouth, as you try to explain
this isn’t a motel; he’ll have to go elsewhere.
Which he does, for now, leaving you to wonder,
as notice after notice is tacked on the door,
who left the humidor in the now empty cellar?
Never mind the cake. Never mind a party hat.
It’s good to get my hands in the earth again,
planting new tomatoes, a pot of parsley.
Digging, I think gardening is really an excuse
for old people to play in the dirt, like we did
as children. It’s a way of being productive
while goofing off, and also, possibly, a way
of not thinking time will pass without reward.
In a season, the basket of bright red fruit,
sprigs of green. It’s not enough food to matter.
without trips to the grocery store, my garden
wouldn’t feed us a week, maybe not a day
if the summer is especially rainy, as it often is.
No, at this age, what matters is doing, not getting,
the kneeling on bad knees in weak Seattle sun,
to be the planter, rather than the one planted.
After she dumps you, or maybe before,
she hooks up with a guy
and marries the dude, just hauls his pants
into a cheap Vegas chapel and ties the knot
with an Elvis impersonator as a chaplain.
By then you’re doing other things,
floundering, but eventually
you land, if not on your feet,
then at least not on your knees,
and there’s a marriage for you also,
a child, vacations driving though Yellowstone,
smiling like some male Mona Lisa
at buffaloes walking down the road,
but when you come home the mail is there,
phone messages, notes on your blog.
She wants to see you again, connect, get in touch,
suddenly, just like that, so many years later
you try to count them and lose count.
Of course, you’re not interested.
You ignore, and this ignoring enrages her.
Like she put you on hold a decade ago
and when she picked up the phone again
she figured you’d still be where she left you
desperately calling her name.
You’re now the worst person she’s ever known
and you hate women, and she can prove it
by selectively quoting a parody piece
you wrote and published six years ago.
And look how fat you got! You’re a bloated pig!
Turns out, though, the only reason she’s into you again
is she’s divorcing the guy
because he makes her sick sitting on the couch all day,
watching sports and not talking to her.
He’s fat too! Everyone’s fat! Except for her
and her turkey neck she hides in pictures with hands
strategically placed under her chin.
Why wouldn’t anyone want to talk to her?
You ask your wife as you sit on the couch, snuggling.
My aunt had three boys,
each with a different man,
but by the time I knew her
she was done with men.
It took her thirty years
but she finally figured out
her soul-mate: a bottle
of Jack Daniels whiskey.
Though there were nights
she cheated on him with beer.
Or brandy. Or whatever booze
happened to be at hand.
If Jack Daniels ever minded
he never said, and their love
stank up her tiny apartment.
And if ever she found Jack
in a bar with another woman,
or a man, she didn’t care
so long as she could take him home.
Years went on in this way.
You never saw two closer lovers.
You should have seen them kiss,
her shaking hand gripping his neck,
pulling him toward her open mouth.
James Valvis has placed poems or stories in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, River Styx, Tampa Review, Tar River Poetry, The Sun, and many others. His poetry was featured in Verse Daily. His fiction was chosen for the 2013 Sundress Best of the Net. He is a previous UCity Review featured
author. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle.
