BESS COOLEY

Eight Years Old and My Grandfather Says My Name Angry

Instead I’d remember the Thanksgiving
we spent the day playing Heidi—you our grandfather
 
playing the grandfather, carrying my sister
on your back up our mountain
of basement stairs. You let me scout ahead
and break ground: the trailblazer.
 
Now I want to time-travel back to then, the day
you knew my name so well, even to hear you
say it angry. You could trace
 
the constellations with your hand overhead
and tell what they were called.
You could show me the brightest planets.
 
Now I look up searching for Jupiter
and the North Star, look down
 
at every rock, waiting for you to tell me
of the earth, how sediment breaks down,
 
how to place our hands on bark to feel
the tree’s age. I’d really listen
 
this time to what you called each layer of soil, to
Canis Minor, Chinese gooseberry, the little
climbing plant.

My Mother Asks for Advice About What to Do With Her Father’s Ashes

Her sister says the ashes these days
can be made into anything—a diamond,
 
or shaped as a coral reef and placed
in the ocean for sea urchins and fish to live in,
 
sand dollars, starfish, for seaweed to grow over
my grandfather, to cover him, for fish to lay new eggs.
 
How small his body could be compacted:
to one pearl. My sister tells us you can make
 
a tree—the bone-white ashes growing
into green, supple branches,
 
little blooming buds, oh,
I will visit every day until they open.

Bess Cooley won the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Verse Daily, and Forklift, Ohio, among other journals. A graduate of Knox College and the MFA program at Purdue University, she lives in Knoxville and teaches at the University of Tennessee, where she is also managing editor of online content for Grist and director of the Young Writers Institute.