Divertimento

Todd Copeland

The memory my grandfather shared

was meant to be lighthearted.

When he was ten, he said, he’d sit

in the Detroiter his father, the senior

William Henry Hochstettler,

had used to move the family

from Rossville, Indiana,

to Bluffton, Ohio, in 1917.

He keenly recalled how the car,

retired on blocks in a shed,

served him as a “toy trip-maker.”

Perhaps it was his Amish blood,

or maybe just being from the Midwest,

but a reflective sadness always seemed

to run through his words, suggesting

something more to the story—

that despite all the fun he had

turning the wheel back and forth

with his skinny Swiss-German arms,

looking around at pretend traffic

and imagining himself somewhere grand,

he knew the day would end with

the kind of glum introspection that walks

alone across an Allen County farm at dusk.

Todd Copeland is the author of the narrative nonfiction book The Immortal Ten, the second edition of which is forthcoming from Baylor University Press. His other works include Like All Light (2022), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press, and the poetry chapbook The Book as Knife (Ravenna Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Image, The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lake Effect, and Sugar House Review, among other publications, and his essays have been published in such journals as Literary Imagination, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Media, War & Conflict. A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas. More information can be found at toddcopelandwriter.com.