The Three Weisses Poem by Michael Salcman

Shades and graces come in threes: my cousins in Queens
were aunt and uncle to me,
the first I knew as elderly
rich with sandpapered faces
and thin-rimmed glasses they wore like monocles.

My first lesson in the upper classes—
a tinted portrait above the mantle
where Hettie and Syd and Uncle Carl were posed as kids
in white smocks with puffy sleeves
big as their heads, and a favorite spaniel for color.

Upstairs their sentient mother lived in solitary splendor,
my father's Aunt Rose, already a hundred
when I was five, whose backside routinely greeted me
freshly bathed and powdered
with a faint smell of garlic and uric acid in Queens.

Syd's husband I never knew
or can't remember, and soon after he died
she moved back in with the other two
and seemed as much a spinster as they ever did,
eternally wed to brother and sister.

Of the past not a word was spoken—
one could never know how Hettie's young heart
had been broken or why Carl with a smile like Coolidge
never pursued a bride
or wore sweaters in summer until the day he died.