Herbert Schmitt

The summer I almost became a Republican

was spent with my grandparents

playing eighteen hole rounds of golf

on moderately warm California afternoons.

The course contained the medicated stillness

of the seniors living in the gated community,

as if pills planted in the fairway

had fertilized these placid greens. In the evenings

grandfather and I would play billiards with the free market,

the free market discussing his unregulated moustache

and drinking from a bottle of heavy tariffs.

He would fall asleep on the leather couch

claiming there was nowhere else for him to go,

and my grandfather would be confused. He was always gone

by morning when we gathered to watch deer in the yard,

mist arising from their nostrils

like smoke drifting from a cave of dwarves.

That summer I did not wear a single shirt

without a collar, I became convinced

that if I remained silent

I would learn to love the free market,

singing about his oil price eyes

and all his elaborate stocks.

My grandfather must have been surprised

when he saw me two years later

with my hair dyed black

and a permanent scowl

inflicted by high school, abandoning shopping

for the shadows of malls.

When Herbert Schmitt died

I wasn't there to see him. I wish I could have enjoyed

one more moment of that stillness

when I was young,

before we knew who I was.