The Waltz We Were Born For

Walt McDonald

1934 –

2022

I never knew them all, just hummed
and thrummed my fingers with the radio,
driving five hundred miles to Austin.
Her arms held all the songs I needed.
Our boots kept time with fiddles
and the charming sobs of blondes,

the whine of steel guitars
sliding us down in deer-hide chairs
when jukebox music was over.
Sad music’s on my mind tonight
in a jet high over Dallas, earphones
on channel five. A lonely singer,

dead, comes back to beg me,
swearing in my ears she’s mine,
rhymes set to music that make
her lies seem true. She’s gone
and others like her, leaving their songs
to haunt us. Letting down through clouds

I know who I’ll find waiting at the gate,
the same woman faithful to my arms
as she was those nights in Austin
when the world seemed like a jukebox,
our boots able to dance forever,
our pockets full of coins.

Shiny as wax, the cracked veneer Scotch-taped and brittle. I can’t bring my father back. Legs crossed, he sits there brash with a private’s stripe, a world away from the war they would ship him to within days. Cannons flank his face and banners above him like the flag my mother kept on the mantel, folded tight, white stars sharp-pointed on a field of blue. I remember his fists, the iron he pounded, five-pound hammer ringing steel, the frame he made for a sled that winter before the war.

My wife takes salt for starters, and rusted strands of barbed wire, the iron Grandfather left. Chips chunks from a salt block mired in sand, that tongue-rubbed marble artwork of the West, anywhere cows roam—not buffaloes that lick their salt from cactus and the bones of coyotes. Takes bones, a skull, when she sees one. Takes snakeskin like twisted strips of film. Looks under yucca for the best, six feet at least. But fierce grandfather snakes don’t rattle until they’re sure, so she listens before she stoops.

When I take my dachshund jogging, boys and widows gawk and stop tossing balls or lopping limbs off shrubs. They call and point at long, pot-bellied Oscar trotting like a rocker horse, tongue wagging, dragging on grass when he hops over skateboards, long muzzle wide as if laughing, eager, sniffing the breeze. All Oscar needs is a tree like a mailbox, postcards from dogs he barks at at night, and odd whiffs he can’t place.

Poems

The Waltz We Were Born For

More by this poet

My Father on His Shield

Gardens of Sand and Cactus

Jogging with Oscar

Poems

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The Waltz We Were Born For

More by this poet

My Father on His Shield

Gardens of Sand and Cactus

Jogging with Oscar

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