Poem 9 -Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a great couple of holidays.
Because I am extra sentimental after a night of drinks, I'm posting now. There's no telling what kind of treacle you'd have to swallow if I blogged tomorrow.
I started this poem a while back (2004), but since I just finished Stumbling On Happiness, an anti-self-help kind of book by Daniel Gilbert, I wanted to revisit this poem.
This poem has a title.


Poem for Grandma

I'll bet you anything there are houses on streets
where cast shadows of horse chestnuts,
larches, oaks fall against naked paint.
Between door and window,
stand walls forgetting the shadows
of boys and girls-
building houses of forget.
I am starched out there,
stiffening against the days,
in a fifteen-year-old photograph,
like tulip bulb in November dirt.
I know years before I sat on the stool,
smiling with my mouth closed,
before the gloss flattened
me into a frame
and more between taking and looking.
But now I steal glow from young cheeks
to light cells in gray matter.
Where in me is that boy?
And you will say the eyes, the eyes
and if we could hear him laugh...
and I say, the boy never grinned;
we made him today
with Kodak paper and sun,
drying rain on glass.