A Vision
His long underwear, and that time carrying his overnight slop bucket, spare room through kitchen, flicked sign from our mother, her cease and desist over eggs or oatmeal, days some said grammar school, still arithmetic at a tablet, the Virgin Mary eked out to high plastic on a shelf. Old, older than prayer, than any buzzing in the trees, any should or you shouldn’t, his looking not left nor right, fixed slow, the union suit stained, stretched, the split back a backside. To ghost is a verb. The body fits or it isn’t. The Beatles about to be bigger than Jesus, my brother wise-guying secret bolts from the blue, me to my hiding and hidden, head bent over the last most vapid good-girl book. Broke off in space a room, my grandfather in it zoomed midcentury, born to the lost real one, left, little town downstate, silent ticking house he wound and oiled with a feather. Nightsoil, a name that looks away, his hand gripping the metal rim. The worst is kindness. To see like it’s nothing, our zero to his gone, going invisible doomed delicate step and step by step by now.
