Untitled Photograph
Domenic J. Scopa
without a date to help me
with her history,
my grandmother wearing a white blazer
is singing,
microphone in her right hand
distanced from her mouth
slightly more than usual
She is belting a note,
maybe from Holliday’s “Body and Soul,”
her favorite song to cover.
The audience in this church basement
seems sold-out.
After a while,
because I know so much
about her life,
because the mute spotlight
will never dim,
I begin to wonder if my grandmother
was beaten hours before this performance,
if there is the beginning of a divorce
she never filed, spring-like, in the air.
Perhaps her singing is a pouring out
so passionate,
to these strangers lost in thought
like Dementia patients
in the terminal stages of the disease.
Her children are probably home
from class by now.
Yet, she has chosen to confide
in this audience,
as she once did to her husband,
who could never comprehend her any better.
Of course,
she may be perfectly content,
and I am imposing
time’s strange torque.
Maybe her eyes are swollen,
because she is completely captured
by the slurred veneer of chords,