Crane Watchers

Rick Marlatt

Spring is inventory for everything I owe my dead grandfather, most notable is my sense of irony.      

After giving up on his marriage, he leaves me this rust-boned tractor that refuses to die.            

Following a life detesting the smell of fear, he leaves this talon-like, formidable nose.                     

His only conviction was to never waste a minute, and I have this watch that has never worked.     

Odd that a man who so famously hated trees was buried in a casket bordered with evergreens.      

Such a mystery, it is, that I find so much fodder in a man who detested poetry.          

A self-described people person, he treated his family like the soil he suffocated with pesticide.        

He hated passionately the tourists who parked alongside the road with their binoculars.  

Retired folks from Florida, Alabama who drove their RVs to Nebraska to watch the cranes nest.       

He used to swerve at them in his truck, screaming, “Get off the road you dumb sons a bitches!”    

He’d turn, his lips a contortion of barbed wire, “By Christ, one day I’ll mash ‘em into the ditch.” 

Worst of all were the converted mid-westerners, he called them defectors, deserters, traitors.   

600,000 cranes descend each March for two weeks on their route from the desert to Canada.                

It’s said the early people here formed languages from mimicking the sounds of the birds.          

Watching a Georgia couple pile out for what looks like their final crane trip, I think of him.            

They set up a picnic table on the shoulder, she pours out tinkling ice tea from a green thermos.        

He lights up a smoke, nibbles on a perfectly cut ham sandwich, they wear matching sunglasses.     

They sit silently in the dusk watching the cranes hunker down, her head rests on his shoulder.         

Passing them slowly I catch myself smiling in the rear-view; this I get from my grandmother.