Your Last Video

There’s our Jo Jo, in the video she

took of herself preparing a recipe for

braised beef neck bone and seasoned turnips

only a week or so before the accident

that devastated us. For the longest time

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the clip,

sorely aware that hand, pinching the salt,

busy with the knife and onion, now lay cold

in cherrywood in the Wisconsin earth.

The oaks through winter aptly wore no green.

Wind ushered cloudy skies. I’d forgotten

about it altogether. Then one day

there it was in my files, jo jo_s julia—

hovering out on a new PC’s large screen,

her voice chirping on to my astonishment.

Stir the vinegar briskly, adding oil,

a drop or two—oops, three… Strange how cooking

draws out the intensity in her, the swallowed

husky voice, her look’s aimed fire.

Why doesn’t Jo Jo smile? her mom frowned.

That isn’t my little girl. True to the mother

that somehow may never be consoled.

She was determined to succeed at everything,

shadow and pith, the hairbrush in her mirror

to the subtleties in settlement depositions—

vying for partnership in the firm.

Clyde her husband didn’t grasp every hand

extended from the sleeves of their tailored suits.

Her driver’s heavy foot was notorious.

Either you slow down, I once barked at her

from my squirming passenger seat,

or stop the damn car and let me out.

I’ll walk, I told her. Kill yourself if you want to.

I told her that. I didn’t mean it that way

of course, and how I deal with having said it

is with admiration for her persistence that could

make me say a thing because I meant it

beyond how out of line it was. Courage,

I often wonder, or restraint from offending,

which is the greater virtue? Honesty or kindness—

wholly ignoring the context of that morning

as though it were all fate for a type

of personality, all her will. And nothing to do with

the unseen ice on the road into the curve.