Two Poems by Peter Mladinic

by Peter Mladinic

Buried Tenderness

I couldn’t attend Paul’s funeral.

He was an undertaker,

and my handsomest male relative,

with the dark Mediterranean good looks

of a movie star,

my brother-in-law’s brother-in-law.

I disliked his two snooty daughters.

I never made an effort to know them.

His widow didn’t even acknowledge my

sympathy card.

His good looks take me back

to the house my father grew up in,

and who lived there

when I was a kid.

My grandmother and my uncle were okay.

But my uncle’s family, his wife, son,

and three daughters were like ice.

In their cellar a coal bin under the stairs

took up a corner;

a long, wide bed of coal, shining and black,

so it sparkled.

Beauty I never touched.

Paul’s black hair in time turned gray.

He was never aloof,

his warmth as steadfast as the cold shoulder

I got in that house.

My father’s father was laid out in that house.

He died before I was born.

My mother’s wake, Paul took care of,

at the funeral home.

Same with my father’s.

At my father’s wake I met a woman

who was at his father’s viewing,

the house with the cold bin,

just a girl then, standing over the corpse

when its eyes opened.

Paul told me, “You’re like your father.”

My father got along with people.

I made an effort;

that’s what I remember, but memory’s tricky.

Newport Wedding

Jackie and Pat were getting married

in the ballroom of a big hotel.

Jackie’s brother-in-law

Mike, said, “Kids need their cell phones.”

I don’t even recall how cell phones

entered the conversation.

Likely I was bitching about my job

because somebody, maybe Amanda

or Mike, asked, How’s the teaching going?

Mike said, “Kids today ...”

I should have said, “You’re wrong, Mike.

I’m in the classroom. Kids today

need a voice. They don’t need to sit there

playing with their phones.

Maybe I’m boring the hell out of them,

but what do you know?

You work on a fishing boat.”

The reception was at a seaside pavilion,

near the water that, even in June,

looked too cold to swim in,

up in ritzy Newport.

It was the last time I saw Paul.

He died a few months after the wedding.

I didn’t really like Paul’s wife,

but Paul was my favorite distant relative.

An undertaker, he buried my mother,

then my father.

Whenever I’d see him he’d say,

“You remind me of your father.”

At my mother’s wake a Vietnamese priest

spoke. My niece Carolyn and her pal

snickered at his accent.