Five Poems by David Jibson

 

Things I Learned from Reading My Own Memoir

 

I was less successful than I thought I was.
I had worse parents than I thought I had.
Everything I know is wrong.
Everything I remember is false.
I thought I would make a difference.
Gravity is not always my friend.
The things I did for others, I did for me.
Some things are worth doing badly.
I don’t have a lucky number.
Choose the simplest font.
I was not the lover that I imagined.
There’s no good reason to write a memoir
unless you’re Winston Churchill.
I thought I would make a difference.

Notes from the Lake County Jail

 

I never liked Bolodino.
He sat at a corner table at the reunion
with a woman I presumed to be his wife.
Prettier than mine, you Nimrod.
I couldn’t figure it.
Bolodino was the same ugly bastard
I remembered from high school.


“Bolodino, how are you? You haven’t changed a bit.”
You’re fatter, uglier and going bald.
“You have,” he said.
I’ll let that one go.
I offered a hand, but he ignored it.
“This is my wife, Linda,” he said.
“Linda, this is my classmate, Baker.”
“Barker,” I corrected him, “Chuck.
That’s two, you pig. You damn well know my name.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
She nodded but didn’t speak.


“So what are you doing these days, Bolodino?”
I picture you cheating people selling used cars.
“Selling used cars,” he said.
“Got my own lot right here in town.
You should come by. I’ll give you a deal.”


“I’ll keep that in mind”
for the day Republicans start telling the truth.
“You do that, Baker,
or you could be in for a wedgie.”


Then — that stupid Bolodino smirk,
that thin-lipped curl
beneath his porcine nostrils
and greasy, pencil mustache.
He reminded me of everything
I hated about about growing up
in this jerkwater town.
Well — screw you, Bolodino.
Someday I’m gonna knock that smirk
right off your ugly face…

 

Fugitive Memories

 

     “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality. It is not fixed and immutable…”
               — Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, University of California at Irvine

 

1957: My little league team loses the final game of the season and finishes in last place. I am the starting pitcher. Mr. Duncan tells me it isn’t my fault. “All I wanted from you was to throw strikes and that’s exactly what you did, but we didn’t have players in the field who could catch the ball.” The team goes for ice cream. I have vanilla.

 

1971: I get married on March 25th. I ask my friend, Arthur, to be best man. He shows up a week early, tells me he thought the wedding was this week because he couldn’t imagine I’d pick a date on the weekend of the NCAA final. After he leaves, I call Ben, who doesn’t like basketball, and ask him what he’s doing next weekend. Ben suggests I call Arthur. I explain to Ben what happened. I tell him that now he’s my best friend.

 

1954: I’m in first grade and I go home for lunch. My sister, Joy, is heating Campbell’s Tomato Soup on the stove. She calls for me to help, but I don’t go because I’m six and I can’t cook.  Soon, she comes running past me toward the front door. Her clothing is on fire. She runs into the yard. A woman stops her car, gets out and tackles Joy to the ground, taking off her own fur coat to smother the flames. The neighbor across the street sees this through her window and comes out to help. They put Joy in the lady’s car and they drive off. The neighbor calls out to me that she’ll call my mother from the hospital. I step on a bit of Joy’s blouse, still smoldering on the lawn. I walk back to school without any lunch.

 

2011: Working for hospice, I meet a man named Dennis, a Coast Guard veteran, who’s dying of pancreatic cancer. He tells me he is one of a handful of people who has been to both the north and south poles. He shows me a special medal he says commemorates that fact. He wears it pinned to his pajamas and says it will go into the box that contains his ashes. I can’t think of anything I’d want to put in the box that contains my ashes.

 

1965: It’s Christmas Eve and my father comes home drunk. He’s passed out in his car and I only find him because I’m taking the trash out to the burn pit.  I shake him and pry an eyelid open to wake him up. He staggers toward the house and I gather up all the presents he’s bought, most of them from the Western Auto Store next to Claude’s Bar. He’s bought me a whole case of BBs. I’m too old for a BB gun.

 

1976: I’m visiting my sister, Kay, in Pennsylvania. I’ve just separated from Margo. Kay suggests I take her single friend, Tanya, out to dinner. I don’t want to,  but Kay tells me that Tanya has already said yes, and is excited to meet me. I pick Tanya up at her trailer park. Her two kids are in the yard with a teenage babysitter. Tanya’s not bad looking but I’ve never felt attracted to redheads. Dinner conversation is sporadic and dull. When I drop Tanya off back at her trailer, it’s still daylight. I don’t think she’s excited anymore.

 

2023: I get an email from Monica King, but she has a different last name now. We worked on a college newspaper together more than fifty years ago. I thought I might be in love with her back then, but figured she was way out of my league,  so I never asked her out. One day, I found her class schedule for the next semester in the office and I switched some of my classes to match hers. It didn’t do any good. I still never asked her out. I wonder if her hair still smells like it did back then. Probably not.

 

1953: My sister Ann and I are doing dishes. We get into an argument about who’s going to wash and who’s going to dry. I have a potato peeler in my hand and I pretend I’m going to stab her with it. She puts up her hand at just the wrong moment and the peeler opens a large gash in her hand. Blood goes everywhere.  My mother takes Ann to the emergency room. She has to have stitches. I do the dishes by myself for a long time.

 

1980: I’m moving to Ann Arbor. I arrive with my rented truck the day after a violent thunder storm has knocked out the power. They say it will be days before everything is restored. I get the van unloaded but the stores and restaurants are all closed so I can’t get anything to eat. I drive back to Lansing that night. I have to return the truck anyway and pick up my car. I stop at a gas station on the way back and buy beef jerky and some other snacks. I decide I’m too tired to drive so I pull into a rest area to sleep until morning. I discover that some of the people you see sleeping in rest areas live in their cars and park there overnight because of the bathrooms and vending machines. Some of them seem to know each other. I’m not sure if I should feel sorry for them or envy them.

 

2022: My last surviving sister dies of COVID. My niece tells me she thinks she got it because her neighbors threw her a big 80^th birthday party, even though everyone was supposed to be in quarantine. I had gone the year before to see her. While walking a Lake Erie beach so she could look for beach glass, she wondered if this might be our last time together. Later, we bought green tomatoes from a farmer who looked like Richard Brautigan and fried them for supper that night. Her husband had never had them before.

 

1978: Harriet, who hates her name so goes by Angie, tells me she is a virgin. We’ve been seeing each other for about a month, and I had already guessed. I tell her intercourse is not the only way for a couple to enjoy sex. She asks me to show her, so I do. I like to think I made her future husband’s life a little more interesting.

 

2012: A hospice patient I’ll call Mr. K. was a long-time broadcaster with The Voice of America. I find out he was a friend of Robert Frost. They had dinner together whenever Robert was in Washington, once with John Kennedy when Robert was preparing his inauguration poem. Kennedy asked Frost to recite Stopping by Woods…, which he did, but he missed the entire third stanza. Mr. K. thought it was a better poem without it. I guess everybody IS a critic.

 

1994: A friend of my ex-wife calls with the news that Margo has committed suicide. Margo and I have been divorced a long time and I haven’t seen or talked to her in several years. I don’t think it would have made a difference if I had, but you never know in a situation like this. Margo didn’t leave a note.

 

Fathers’ Hopes for the Sons

 

In the picture are a bluetick hound and six men
with long handled peaveys
on a raft of logs afloat on the Muskegon River.
The men are my great uncles.

In the discoloured albumin print,
you cannot see their faces
because of the shadows cast
by their broad-brimmed hats,
but if you could, you would know
right away they are brothers.

A seventh brother, Albert,
is missing from the photograph
because he left the family business
to study pharmacy at a college
in a city far away.

I suppose my great grandfather, Robert,
shook his head and shrugged,
just as my father must have done
when I told him I had no interest in
following him into his construction business
and, instead, chose a path of my own,
and just as I must have done when my son
forsook a college education to become
the man my father hoped I would be.

 

Nothing’s Going On

 

It was past midnight when Marge called.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have answered,
but, this late, I thought it might be something serious.
“Do you know what your son has been up to?” she asked.
“I haven’t talked to him,” I told her.
“Well, you should,” she said.
“He’s been up to his old tricks and you need to talk to him.”
“What do you expect me to do about it, Marge?
He’s forty-one years old and he hasn’t listened to me since he was eleven.
“Well, the least you can do it try,” she said.
“Lord knows, I have. Now it’s your turn.”


“Leon, you know how I hate when your mother calls. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on, Pop. Why? What did she tell you?”
“She said you’ve been up to your old tricks again.”
“You know how she exaggerates, Pop.
Don’t listen to her. Nothing’s going on, I promise.”
“You sure, Leon? Why would she call me if nothing’s going on?”
“She’s just mad I haven’t brought my wife over to meet her yet.”
“You have a new wife? Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“She’s not exactly new. Sorry I haven’t mentioned her.
I guess it slipped my mind.”


“Well, Leon, maybe if you did what you mother wants
just this once, she would stop calling me.”
“I can’t help you this time, Pop.
You need to deal with her on your own.
and really — nothing’s going on.”

David Jibson - Having grown up in rural Michigan, David Jibson now lives in Ann Arbor where he is  the editor of Third Wednesday, an independent quarterly  journal of literary and visual arts, a member of the Poetry Society of Michigan and a coordinator of The Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle. He is retired from a long career in Social Work, most recently with a Hospice agency. His poetry has been published in dozens of journals both in print and online.