Nikita Kruschev

My grandmother puts the dead in heaven,
and fixes supper.
Sometimes hearty stew
from the Winter Soups book,
and sometimes stuffed peppers,
hellishly hot from the oven,
the recipe, her mother's mother's.

She is of an age,
and I can hear the trepidation in her voice
when she talks about a year or two from now.
I can hear some kind of emptiness
when she speaks of five or ten.

Once I saw her fall,
on the stoop of the home of her friend.
I had driven us there and was waiting in the Buick.
I saw her ring the bell,
and checked my hopeful phone.
My gaze returned to the house
when I sensed a small commotion,
and all of her bulk was there on the concrete
face down and not moving.

There were two moments:
My god she's dead.
Running.

She was sitting when I reached her,
drugstore glasses all askew,
mussed hair mussier,
wild with its glass-white sheen
and patch of yellow in the bangs
from some chemical experiment
she conducted back in the 50's.
Bit of blood on her forehead,
and a broken arm and laughing.

When I think of the 50's
I have an idea
of Elvis, and Eisenhower,
Ozzie and Harriet and Kruschev.

The Big Lady has the decade in the flesh -
a starter home and diaper rash,
a beagle, the stove pipe leak,
another in-law from Brooklyn,
a packet of seeds for a vegetable garden.

But like Nikita said
to those Western ambassadors in Moscow,
History is on our side.
We will bury you.

I have an iPod and an iPhone too.
And five or ten or twenty years at least
to learn how to make stuffed peppers.