My Typewriter and My Gun

My father left me
a typewriter and a gun.
He didn’t have much stuff.
Six months before he died
driving through Kansas
selling brake linings
a tornado leveled his home.

But he had this typewriter,
a portable Smith Corona
he used to file sales reports.
(But not for the last trip he took.)
And he had this gun,
a souvenir he lifted
from the dead body
of a Japanese soldier
on Roi-Namur or Iwo Jima
and shipped home.
These are now my things.
My typewriter. My gun.

I used the typewriter
through high school and college,
well into my teaching career,
until I got my Mac.
I pounded out poems on that machine
before taking a thirty-year break,
then worksheets and vocab quizzes.
Much of my mind coursed through
those keys. More than once
I Macgyvered it together,
repaired the “L” key
with a twist of wire
from a sack of bread.

The Arisaka rifle came late.
My brother somehow snagged it,
restored it, took it to a range, fired it.
Then he died. It sits now
atop my bookcase. When I watch TV,
more often than I should,
I glance up, consider it,
imagine my father, eighteen,
victorious, alive, standing over
a dead man who tried to kill him.
And my brother, laid off at forty-five.
He took that blow, and many others.
Never gave up.

Daughters, when I’m gone,
one of you gets the typewriter,
one of you gets the gun.
You’ll both want the typewriter,
its meaning sweet and obvious.
Don’t argue. Flip a coin,
like your mother and I did
when we couldn’t agree
what color to paint the house.
She won, so now we live happily
in this ugly brown house.

Don’t shun the gun because
it’s a gun. I’ve never shot one,
but I’ve battled too. For thirty years
I trained myself, in a dojo,
to wade into conflict,
then went to work where I was
knee-deep in the stuff.
I’m telling you now,
I’m as much a warrior
as I am a poet, though not,
I grant, that much of either.

When each of you takes
one of these things,
you each will have
all of me.

---

Brad Shurmantine lives in Napa, Ca., where he writes, reads, naps, and tends three gardens (sand, water, vegetable), seven chickens, two cats, and two bee hives. His fiction and personal essays have appeared in Mud Season Review, Loch Raven Review, and Catamaran; his poetry in Third Wednesday, Delta Poetry Review, and Blue Lake Review. He backpacks in the Sierras, travels when he can, and prefers George Eliot to Charles Dickens, or almost anyone. Website: bradshurmantine.com