Your huge hands,
a pool champion’s sausage fingers
carving roast dinners.
I rarely think of you now
but memory lingers.
It’s leaves return every year;
they rustle in the rain.
The walnut tree
with the swing.
You’d push me so high
rush of wind and air,
chunks of cherry bough
caught in my hair
and I thought I would never come down.
Your skin wrinkled in the sun
like an apricot.
And me and Elisha would run
and race electrical jeeps
in the garden fetching you walnuts.
I was afraid of your pond,
you said there was a shark in it,
dangerous like the
cancer in your body,
I was afraid of
the pig skin patch on your arm.
Considered too young for the funeral,
my memories look like the photos I look at afterwards.