This week’s poem, Lynne Benoit’s “Limington,” offers a nuanced portrait of an aging grandfather and the past. I love this poem’s vivid range of glimpses, memories, and artifacts, and how they all add up to a whole — a life to hold.

Benoit grew up in the western mountains of Maine. She lives and writes in Wells. “Limington,” she tells us, was inspired by Japanese Tanka and the poetry of Kimiko Hahn.

Limington

I visit him anyway, dragging my belief that family is a splinter, embedded.

I arrive late and drowsy with obligation. My grandfather in a kitchen chair at the
mouth of the barn. I am worth a wait.

In the house a photograph poses my mother and her sisters as girls.
One bully — or three?

Usual zealots darken the door sidelights and he scolds them away. I don’t know
how to be in a room with him.

Upstairs, mirrors face each other, my repeating image stuck in their throats. We
don’t need magic to become demons.

Neglected contents in the flour bin. I bake biscuits that died with a grandmother.

In the empty roosts and manured air of the old hatchery, doorway after doorway,
a cleansing distance.

I drive him and his car to the aging town hall. On the abandoned upper floors
I discover no need to rush back to myself.

From dim closets in the eaves I bring his baby shoes. Our knees touch
to balance the wooden box.

Their house dilutes anger. A screened porch in summer dusk,
easy fireside laughter. Always, the stairway’s cracking knuckles.

Coughed up blood announces his own endangerment. The family mobilizes
without touching.

What is left but to get in the Oldsmobile one more time? A few miles on, he
gestures for a swerve into apple blossoms. A summer road thin, and dirt.

Someone loved enough to take our photograph. I leaned in like family, hair
grazing his cheek. Just us two.

– Lynne Benoit

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Limington,” copyright 2023 by Lynne Benoit, appears by permission of the author.