My father's father was never the best sort of person. Once
He gave me a necklace. It was a pink crystal
On a single black cord. I never liked it much,
And cannot say why I wore it, but I can still see
His thin frame, sick even then, with that white
Surprise of hair shooting out like a cloud from his head,
Aged eyes hidden by dark glasses (the refusal to grow old),
Folding in half to sit next to me on the robin's blue eggshell
Porch, and me rubbing my feet still against the concrete steps
As my brothers dueled with lightsabers across the dead July grass.
I can only grasp at the few other things that I remember about him-
The smell of cigarettes & alcohol clinging to the walls of the guest bedroom;
His sunken face (soul gone for hours yet);
and the oxygen machine into which he breathed his last. His funeral
was a circle of strangers, standing
Somewhere out in the woods around his jar of ashes.
Someone, probably my father, played a song on his guitar,
Bittersweet notes echoing and echoing through the September of the trees.
It's a song we sing at camp, in the summertime,
And by the time its last note is just a whisper,
I excuse myself and slip away to look up at the stars and because
I can still feel my own life force fading into the night, like his ashes-
The last fragments of a shattered life,
Left to the mercy of the northern wind.