Bruce Whitacre | The Ecru Shirt

The Ecru Shirt

 

I never knew anyone else who claimed it,

But Dad insisted it was his favorite color.

When our young family moved into our $25,000

Custom-bilt split-level, the kitchen was yellow-warm.

 

Our motorboat had a goldenrod dual hull.

He could not mount his skis himself,

But he spent entire weekends towing

His sons tandem in his sparkling wake.

 

Having a favorite color is convenient to others,

An easy default for ties, appliances, even for cars,

But it captured as well his warmth and his wit,

His mellowing with age into a crusty outlier.

 

Flipping through his closet the day after,

We chose the parti-colored sport coat;

It matched the well-worn ecru shirt.

And so he went loudly to the grave.

 

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared in Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is an activist and advocate for the arts and social justice. He lives in Forest Hills, Queens.