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Aunt Eartha Lee
Danny Bellinger On the first day I walk
into the living room of my father
a photo book of yellowed memories spilling out of the kitchen
thirty years or more, faces whose names I am too
embarrassed to remember, why my father’s abrupt absence
shut a door of my childhood behind. On the couch my grandmother
s daughter, the oldest living sister of my father, Aunt
Eartha Lee is looking through/me with Grandma Laura
s oyster eyes, as if she knows more than she’s telling
about our long awaited and troubled
reunion, as if a soul were growing tired of pretending
to be a body, with only glimpses respectfully chiding my will
to hers, a clairvoyant, shy wo/man saying come to me
and sit because I’m all you have left, her smile
holding joy tart with excitement/controlled in her mouth, rubies
pomegranate red, her hands resting ripe on a cane, a staff
for the one who holds the oral history photographs, secrets
that only family graveyards can remember to tell.
On day two she is wearing
black hat, black dress, black shoes black
skin and sadness, a body that will never again see
the clay of her brother, Earlington Leroy, better known to me
as Uncle Roy. She has not learned how to be
wholly other yet, and those eyes of hers know more
than holy-ghost filled. Her crying
is not like ours.
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