morning my grandfather wheels with one hand his chair and with the other dips a net into the many tops of a pool. he taps the rim of the net on the walk to better appraise the wet calf legwork of a grasshopper. he lets the net touch bottom then releases it wholly to its listening. he will avoid feeling like the net and instead allow his hands their errancy to the tugged down caps of invisible boys. a healthier man, a more nervous man, would smoke.
he rolls his sleeves and can better see dropped pipes, freed hammocks. an ant in the low, upturned hill of his elbow makes for his palm and is quickly there and lost. not today, but others, he has heard children skin their knees at which point houses appear for them to enter.
from the chair he lifts his forgotten buttocks and they hold for only a moment their dream of sitting. he circles then the cement sides of the pool and then itβs dark. so dark that when he is visited by two bright shoes he believes they are alone and so ties them underwater.