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ELEGY FOR A BACHELOR UNCLE
We knew too much about him, and too little,
our mother's only brother, our fat, apologetic uncle,
who had always lived at home, at our grandmother's house,
because of habit, or the drift of a few years too many,
or because, as he said, she needed him.
His room was fringed with the dead shells of his hobbies
and the few books he was always intending to finish.
Growing up, we took it for granted that he should be
text-book illustration of a popular theory,
complete with selfish possessive mother, security,
and mannerisms too dull, too ingrown, to be borne
at close quarters. On the occasions when we called
we always left early, brazen with excuses.
He was not fifty when he died, leaving only my grandmother
shocked and unprepared, groping for a handkerchief.
We knew too much about him, and too little,
because now that he is dead
I think of a day shortly before the end
when he put a record on for me and my new bride –
it was a dance-thing old as the thick shellac disc
its sound had been scored into – and there
on the scratched veranda he asked her to dance,
spinning her round and round effortlessly. I was embarrassed –
but he smiled, and was unfamiliar
and at ease, and I saw a drowned young man,
my uncle, urging through the mediocre decades,
groping up to the last rim of Possible, yet,
forgetting the mirror and all the intractable measurements.
But the record lasted only three minutes;
and I took her away quickly. Now I must live
among acts not done and words too long unsaid.
I knew too little; and he found me out.
I wish I could believe him wholly dead.
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My mother's only sibling, Peter, was born some years after her. As a child she
adored her kid brother - but the age difference made itself known soon enough,
when she married and the demands of rearing her young brood forced the two of
them apart. When I was small our paths rarely crossed, and I always remained shy
of this strange, taciturn character with the long, rather scraggly hair. We spoke
awkwardly, if we spoke at all.
I understood he was an artist and musician, but of an unorthodox bent which I (at
such a tender age) could not fathom; in my innocence I soon decided that this was
enough to know, and left it at that.
He was not thirty when he died. I was barely nine, not too young to comprehend but
too young for my folks to burden me with the details. And I am still unburdened...
I recall numerous outings down to a hospital but on each occasion being left there
in the car, bored to death. I do not recall a funeral.
A decade or so later, shuffling through his belongings I suddenly found unusual
books, atonal records, esoteric scores he had played, surreal poetry - often
wordplay-related - and hundreds of amazingly intricate, hypnotic doodles he had
drawn. These morsels of what might have been gripped me at once, but too late I
had begun to solve the riddle... I am left with my inadequate knowledge of this
unique man, a boxful of whose hardbacks now reside on my bookshelf, who composed
and whose musical tastes were so like my own, whose middle name I answer to...
whom I have almost become.
I knew too little, but he never guessed.
I wish I could believe that, once, he lived.
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