To Make It Now

David Romtvedt

Grandma stands in the kitchen, still alive.

Her first man died in the twenties,

forty years later the second went the same way.

She stays alive so we celebrate

another birthday halfway through

her eighties the year I turn thirty.

On the lawn her second son plays volleyball

with his own grown children.

Her eldest son, my father, watches

and makes loud jokes. Like we expect

when we come to this city, it rains.

Everyone plays on, slightly damp.

Later there’s a kind of horseshoes

with giant darts and a plastic ring.

We eat heavy American Food and sit

in lawn chairs or on benches

at borrowed tables.  One grandson

brings his two children but not their mother.

The aunts call him brave

to raise these children by himself,

a man alone.  Grandma loves

her great-grandchildren, their tiny eyes

and hands.  All afternoon she drinks

bourbon and water.  I have made my retreat

to the kitchen where I wash dishes.

My aunt thanks me.  Of course

it is I who must give thanks.

Grandma comes in wanting another drink,

aware that now some whisper

she shouldn’t.  “But why not,” she asks,

“Why shouldn’t an old lady drink if she wants?”

She tells me I am good

and wonders if I think it bad

she drinks.  I have no answer

but pour out more bourbon

and wash more dishes.  She comes close

to me and puts her arm in mine.

How odd that I would grow up

a poet.  My mother has shown her a poem

for my other grandmother, dead

fifteen years before.  “A lovely poem,”

she says, “I had to read it twice.

I didn’t understand at first how a woman

could be a bird or a tree, then

the second time I saw what you meant.”

I am grateful to her for this

and we are quiet.  With so many people

there are plenty of dishes.

Then she says my name, tells me

she too would like a poem,

that would be something.  Grandma

sets her glass on the counter

asking if I can write a poem

before a person is dead?

I rinse the soap off my hands

and promise I will.

“To Make It Now” originally appeared in the Crab Creek Review and in the book A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know (Copper Canyon Press, 1992), a selection of the National Poetry Series.

Fifteen years after my maternal grandmother’s death I wrote a poem for her, which my mother sent to my paternal grandmother who then asked if I could write a poem for her, too, but before she died. I had no idea what to write and told the story of this request to an older poet I knew and admired who smiled and said, “But you see, don’t you, that’s the poem right there, the story you just told me.” In writing it down, I began to think in a new way about the making of a poem.