Because it came from my grandfather's bedroom
it intimidated me at first, dark and brooding
as he was, his Irish melancholy saturated
with cigar smoke and the scent of Scotch whiskey.
Already old when I knew him, he spent each day
in his "library" downstairs, the book-lined lair
where he read the Irish Times and worked the entire
New York Times crossword puzzle before he strolled,
whistling, "dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum," down the Persian-
carpeted hallway, the clink and gurgle of the crystal
decanter against a shot glass all that interrupted his tune.
Each afternoon he drove away in a long, black car
to the Philadelphia Cricket Club where he did something
important, his work running the Doak Woolen Mill—
where his immigrant father began as a picker at ten—
bequeathed to warring sons who'd ruin the family business.
I couldn't imagine what he'd done at this desk, its
stained finish black with time, except pay bills,
and so planned to do the same. Or what he'd stored behind
the twin glazed doors until I unpacked the leather-bound set
of George Eliot's novels, Romola inscribed with the words,
"Bought on our wedding trip to London, November 1908.
This eased my sea-sickness, coming back on the Lusitania."
Or stumbled on the map of the family farm—where my
mother had married—stashed in the secret compartment.
Or found the silver-framed photograph of my golden-haired
mother herself—his favorite daughter—standing on the beach
at Mantoloking, New Jersey, her legs as long as the world
must have seemed the day he snapped the shot, the paper
cover on the back torn away, the words, "Mary to rest,
December 17, 1962," scribbled like a private message
I found two decades later, as I unwrapped this gruff man's
grief and tenderness from where it lay, hidden beneath
the broken-arch top with rosettes and a flaming urn finial,
the things he couldn't say written down, love's shorthand
warm and red as mahogany beneath its dark, Victorian stain.