Susan Glickman

Beauty (1990)

	Maybe there are no easy deaths but Grandpa’s
	was terrible. The scuttling crab-wise crawl
	of the disease eating him
	for months, a slow insult.
5	The scotch-and-nicotine smell of him
	gone off, festering,
	so that even he flinched from his skin,
	that strange dank leather
	clammy as a wet groundsheet
10	stretched over his bones.
	Bones he’d kept modestly hidden
	in his patriarch’s bulk, his executive jowls,
	all naked and poor
	in plain view—my fierce private grandfather
15	exposed.
	My mother was afraid of him:
	his Sit up straight! his Girls
	don’t go to college.
	My sister, only little when he died, remembers
20	a scowling giant whose moustache spoiled
	his kisses.
	And he was fierce, his longshoreman’s fists,
	but with me he was always courtly. We discussed things.
	And Grandpa, you were right,
25	which I knew even then, about beauty.
	It comes from inside, you said (But I was only
	twelve, desperate for power, afraid I might never
	have any) It has nothing to do
	with fashion.
30	We were sitting in your wood-panelled den, the TV on
	to Bonanza or Perry Mason, your favourites,
	and talking. And I knew you were right.
	But even now I can feel that hard little knot, that “no,”
	stuck in my throat like a candy
35	stolen from your secret cupboard and swallowed guiltily
	and whole, that knot of stubbornness which, like the candy,
	like everything I took from you, silver dollars, a complete set
	of Dickens, your gold pen, was mine
	from inside, my true inheritance.