It was the trip up the Amazon
At the age of twelve that, or so
The boy’s mother later insisted,
Undid his wits. How had she ever
Agreed to such a plan? She had resisted,
Of course, but the boy’s rootless Uncle John,
Writing from a museum faraway
In Washington, and the hell-bent child
Himself, had, between them, won the day
Somehow and made her do what never
She should have done: she let the boy go.
No wonder, what with months in the wild—
Savages, the jungle, food, heat, rain—
He’d caught some fever of the brain.

Whatever the case, this boy, my great-
Uncle Grant, came home to Tennessee
And never left the farm again
For long. Deaths, heat, harvests, he stayed on,
Fished the local Amazon,
Hunted the circling hills. The farm passed
To Alfred, his older brother,
Whose consumptive wife, just twenty-three
And pregnant with her third, miscarried
Ten days before spitting up her last
Lifeblood. After a frantic month’s wait,
Alfred found his children a new mother—
And, in all, he made his brother ten
Times an uncle. Grant never married.

. . . But the story’s more complicated
Than this, since Grant doggedly pursued
An alternate livelihood throughout
His life. At sixteen he sent a kind
Of mash note to his mentor, Alexander Graham Bell, whose
Avuncular, long, and long-awaited
Reply (from Nova Scotia!) closed—“Choose
Your goals with care, large and small.
Question everything, but never doubt
The resource of the human mind,
My boy.” Perhaps it was this call
From Bell, and not the jungle, that skewed
Grant’s wits: he became an inventor.

Which was—or was if one can tell
By results alone—the purest folly. His
Dream was of a kind of workbench El
Dorado, where the gold of free
Fancy, mined systematically
At last, would sift itself out.
Not a thing came of his labors
In the end, excepting some
Dubious family tales and—no doubt—
Much laughter for and from the neighbors.
But in the long view—as, say, from
The windows of a plane—bit
By bit his failures feed a soil that is
The richer for those who resisted it. . .

We arrived—my brother and I, each
Competingly agog with the wonder
That boyhood takes in flight—
At the Nashville Airport, there
Met by our tall Aunt Elaine, under
Whose not always watchful eye
We’d spend a month. Next day, we were met by
A list of chores, including some manure
In need of a shovel, which, to be sure,
Was a useful task—if meant to teach
Two city boys never to make light
Of earthbound employment.
Everywhere
Her farm called us with places to explore,
But it wasn’t many days before
We’d turned the lock on that old door
And clambered up some stairs to what
Still was called Grant’s Laboratory.
It was a low, narrow room, a sort
Of loft above a sort of shed.
Surprisingly, a number of tools
And things still lay outspread
On the cobwebbed table—pulleys, rope, spools
Of wire, bottled powders, a score
Of nuts and bolts, a cracked retort—
The leavings of a mind caught
Up in the perpetual motion
Of the alchemist’s lead-fueled notion
Of a lasting conversion to glory.

This was late afternoon. The sun
Again had turned to gold. The room’s one
Window gave upon some lilac bushes
On which a dreamer’s eye might fall
In those whiled hours when it seems
Unclear if he but dreams or starts to feel
The first buried birth-pushes
Of something real
And richly practical. If Grant’s dreams
Were dreams, he breathed no final discontent
In his will, wherein he grandly granted “all
Fruits of my scientific industry,
Now, and in perpetuity,
To the United States Government.”