Kevin Grauke

Final Cut of the Season

What species of grass is it that smells so sweet
when shorn? Fine fescue? Kentucky blue?

I go ages sometimes without catching its scent
but when I do, as I did today, all the years

I’ve gone without distend and grow heavy,
all those deskbound days redolent of nothing

but office-park carpet, printer ink, and fluorescence.
But there it was, that jade spice, on the air this afternoon

as I drove down leafy streets of purling yellow and orange
to watch my son tend goal on a pitch of plastic turf;

there it was, rushing through my chilly windows
on the purest day of this or possibly any October,

eager to fill me to the brink of spilling with memories
of youth and sun-bleached afternoons that, back then,

also smelled of tropical coconut, that copper perfume
of beach towels bobbing on backyard seas of bladed green.

Eulogy

Words for your eulogy have come to me
early, shaming me. If I jot them down,
will death regard this as a beckoning,
a sibling of some coy come-hither look,
the sort once mastered by Theda Bara,
vamp of the silents, who died at seventy
of stomach cancer in ’55, the same year
you turned twenty and fled the dull cruelties
of West Texas for the culture of cities?

But if I don’t, thus perhaps keeping the grave
at bay for at least a few more shining days,
I’ll forget for good the good I want to say,
thus wrecking my paean to your fine life
when its time to be voiced does come.
I wrestle with this as I clutch and shift,
all the while knowing I can take no note,
at least not until I reach a stoplight’s red,
but the greens keep coming, block after block,

driving me to speed faster, to feel the wind
tear at my hair, to push the jittery needle
deeper into hazardous red, to outrun it all.
But then, with still no stop in sight, the words
wing out the window. I brake. Reverse. And hunt
for them, but they’re gone, though I’m still staring
out when the stranger climbs in. Let’s go, he says,
ignoring the seat belt. Where? I ask. Just drive,
he says through black teeth. You’ll find it.

Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Sycamore Review, and Quarterly West. His collection, Shadows of Men (Queen’s Ferry), won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Originally from Texas, he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.