Elegy to an Uncle by Colleen Duncan

When I look back I wonder if it’s you
I remember
or someone made real to me
through stories
and yearnings of others.

Do I really recall those days
out on the old porch
as you made sweet sounds
on your tenor sax –
while I tooted on a toy trumpet
in a duet built on worship?

Did you hoist me on your shoulders
and parade me through the house
out to the subtropical garden,
toss me giggling
into the prickly buffalo grass
and tickle me senseless?

For years after the crash
I would run my hand
over the grease marks on the verandah
where you bent over your bike
tinkering and humming,
wiping your hands on a rag
from one of your mother’s
worn house dresses,
after poking ball bearings
into a jar of vaseline
taken from the house.

They tell me stories now …
how I searched for the bike
after you died
knowing
you were forever out of reach.
The angels, they told me
took you to heaven
on Jacob’s ladder.

At the hospital they cut
your leather jacket from you.
If you’d been wearing a helmet –
or if the driver hadn’t been drunk –
so many ‘if onlys’ inhabit
the stories that keep you alive.

You’d be in your seventies now
if you’d lived beyond your myth.
Maybe you’d be a let-down –
in the way that heros often are,
once you scratch through the
longing and grief.