That Signature Phrase

Thinking in Invisible Ink

My pal Jim’s late father-in-law

told him there’d be no reason

to visit him at the cemetery …

Why should you visit my grave?

I’m not coming to yours.

Transactional, yes, maybe harsh,

kinda funny, but definitely

memorable and, more important

here, endlessly repeatable,

just like my father’s old standby,

Everything depends on

whose ox is being gored,

also harsh, also transactional,

something he repeated often,

well, probably just a few times,

followed by a smug pull

on his panatella, which is frankly

not the point of this poem,

the point being that 22 years

after my father uttered his last

utterance about oxen, I’m still

passing it around like a breath mint

to freshen up conversations, which

in turn brings me around the poetry

bend to say that in the moment

I heard that smirkable remark

about transactional grave visits,

I realized with a cartoonish gulp

that here I am at 77 (oof!)

and as far as I can tell, I don’t have

a signature phrase for my kids

to reprise from the nether world

after I’m nethered out, nothing

to gird their loins, set them straight,

haunt them, make a crowd laugh …

I imagine all seven of them slack-

jawed trying to keep up with a well-

oiled quip from somebody’s beloved

or hated paterfamilia, their uvulas

wobbling in the breathless breeze, waiting

for a few memorable words to stir

the stagnant air, but alas there’s nothing

there, a vast generational abyss

behind them—no bars, no service

in the Bermuda Triangle of my own

personal Bartlett’s, no homespun saying

showing up on this computerized

Magic 8 Ball, and like the old laugher

about not picking a friend’s nose,

it’s suddenly clear as I near the end

of this poem, that just as you can’t be

a saint if you want to be a saint, I can’t be

cherry picking my kids’ memories of me,

and despite the words two old men

might be remembered by, there are no

transactions from the dead zone

after a call gets dropped.

—SL, July 2023, New Paltz, NY