Brad Leithauser
Death of the Family Archivist
What you took away
was something more precious, it turned out,
even than your presence—that of a neat-
knit woman, lined and fine-boned,
given to lingering at the holiday
table for hours on end, although
with little herself to say,
It took us some time—
your death taking us by surprise—
to net our losses. But when questions arose
about some loose scrap of family lore
(Who was the Austrian martinet
so strict he wouldn't have his eight-
year-old son's arm set
when the boy broke it
playing on the banned barn roof? Who
sent the starter's crank winging through
the windshield of his sluggish Model T?
Who eloped with Phil "the Bill" Hill?
Who stole his grandma's silver? Whose
son starved at Andersonville?),
someone would say
"Edith could have told us that . . ." You
who never married, were never known to
conduct a serious romance, whose
long career was famously dull
(linking names to numbers—directory
assistance for Ma Bell),
and who nowhere seemed
to wring from anyone one single strong
emotion beyond an unthinking
gratitude for your surpassing
gentleness, managed ultimately,
nonetheless, to enlist
and mobilize a multi-
generational
army . . . now lost, the lot of them, all
of them gone! And they went in loyal
silence, theirs being a campaign
in which, when history's unlikeliest
general moved, the troops moved with her:
on a night-march into the world's least
understood terrain.
Brad Leithauser, The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.