by Isa Mari De Leon
Medium: Prose Poem
Year: 2021
Publication: Home is Not Here Anthology, 2021
On the day Lolo died, he remembered the important thing: the flowers needed to be watered in the mornings. He awoke when the sky was liver-colored. In one hand, he held an old beer bottle he had filled with water. In the other, he carried a tape recorder, filled with tinny excerpts of Ilocano folk songs. His passing appeared as if it were a series of photographs; in one, he was tending to the lilies and hydrangeas, tipping the bottleneck forward but without precision—wetting the leaves and the petals but not the soil. In the next, he was lying in the dirt amidst the budding Sacramento heat. The path between plants the width of a coffin.
The other things—like being a grandfather, or a military vet, or a human being with hunger and thirst—went unremembered. One night in the family room, he had become fixated on a picture of a young man wearing a soldier’s uniform. He held it between his forefinger and thumb, the picture and his thumbnail matching in sepia color. His eyes had watered for neither nostalgia nor melancholy, but because he had been awake for hours, seated on the couch, unmoving and unblinking.
For decades, the garden had been home to his flowers, and his smoking. He would go out wearing ratty clothes—the same clothes worn in a crop field, in another country, in a garden less gentle. Nicotine caught in rain nets. Mornings of out-blooms and evenings of cigarettes; himself taken by the time more tender.
As a grandfather, he had greeted his grandchildren with a toothless smile, and as a father, he had pulled his children’s ears so hard they bled. When his family found him, a fly had settled on his upper lip. The water spilled out over his abdomen. The tape recorder, hidden beneath the shelves and rows of flowers, played the tune of Pamulinawen, please do not be upset…
This was written during the COVID pandemic, while my lolo (grandfather) was still alive. I always appreciated poetry as a means to hide truth in fiction, and as a method to preempt strong emotions before they take their toll on you. Lolo Died in the Garden was an exercise in both. There’s a more honest version I wrote later… but that’s for his and my eyes.
ISA MARI DE LEON 