Joanne Diaz
Morning in Edison's archive, and the dusty needle
traces its way across the galaxy of a blue amberol cylinder
to evoke the thin sound of "Who Put the Overalls
in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder." Such a silly tune:
in it, Mrs. Murphy uses a pot to wash her laundry,
forgets that she's left the overalls in the pot,
and later, when she cooks her chowder, is appalled
when the overalls float in her giant soup ladle.
Dad sang this song to me on every road trip,
when washing up before or after meals,
when mowing the lawn or playing with me
on the porch. The song was in his helix, too:
he heard it hundreds of times as a fatherless child
during the war. For him, the song was the lullaby
that wafted up from the bar's jukebox on the first floor,
the shattering of glass and the shouting of sailors
through the floorboards. Even for the POWs, the song
was a thread: late at night, when their work was done,
they received permission to leave like all the other soldiers
to visit the pretty Italian-American girls who admired them
from behind the fence. Chowder, potatoes, sailors, Italians:
the food that nourished my father's fatherless mind.
Last night on the phone, seventy years after the fact,
he told me that he couldn't remember exactly where
his own father was buried after he had died
in the Boston Consumptive Hospital.
For years, my grandfather's meager breath was full
of dark weight, tubers dense and white as potatoes.
The wasting disease. The White Plague.
My ten-year-old father wasn't allowed to go
to the wake or to the funeral—another chapter
in that miserable family book—or to the cemetery
that was built, far away, for the poorest immigrants.
Unmarked grave, unseen body, unanswerable questions,
until yesterday, when my father drove
to St. Michael's Cemetery—he knew that much—
offered the name Jose Diaz to the groundskeeper,
and found the spot. There among the crush
of crowded granite tombstones full of vowels
are statues of life-sized men: soldiers, shop owners,
sailors, longshoremen, sometimes unemployed,
often indigent, always olive-skinned, whole families
buried together, the angels of Boston. The air
was warm; the trees and flowers were in full bloom.
Dad opened the trunk, pulled out his lawn chair,
brought it to the unmarked grave, breathed deeply,
and held counsel with a father now less than half
of his own age. This morning, in the safety
of this archive—clean hands, no speech, no one else
in the room—I listen to the record, over and over.