My grandfather was embittered 
by the time I came into his life. 
Index finger lost to a splinter or a saw, 
jobs lost to the Great Depression, 
marriage gone mute, face boarded up 
against the past, he haunted shops, 
factories, and lumberyards where 
men still worked, staring silent
through doors and windows, 
withholding comment on a 
joint too loose or board poorly cut. 
    
But he did teach my father, 
who taught me, to slide a wood screw 
across a bar of soap to lubricate 
stubborn grooves that refused to turn 
into the tight clenched grain 
of unresponsive pine or oak,
a trick that’s served me well, 
but one he couldn’t apply 
to his own gnarled gruffness 
clenched tight against the world’s 
unyielding fact, except for the teasing 
he sometimes pulled from his frayed vest,
the thumb stuck between two of his
remaining fingers that he claimed 
was the nose he’d pulled from my face, 
a trick that always dissolved 
my little self into giggles.
                        

She asked, How many times have you fallen 
in the past six months?  I assumed 
the question was not theological 
but concerned facts of gravity and mass, 
noting that our gross bodies 
are always downward tending, 
a fact itself not without 
theological implications,
so I tried to recall the couple times 
I was pulled unexpectedly to earth.  
Once, shuffling backward on a tennis court, 
the edge of a shoe caught the Har Tru turf. 
Once, while descending some gentle classroom 
steps, I mis-stepped and tumbled nearly
head over heels with enough fanfare 
to prompt a young student to leap 
with great gravity to my fallen aid.
That hardly seemed sufficient, though,
for the eager physician’s assistant
taking the measure of a man of a
certain age, one whose life had seen its falls. 
 
Then I recalled my father-in-law who, 
during our final visit, slid 
ever so slowly down his recliner, 
like a wilting plant in need of water,
to the carpet littered with crumbs he’d
dropped during lunch, his earthbound descent 
mirroring the sun’s declining light
as the window sill’s rising shadow 
rode time up the far wall,
first from the floor, then from the chairs, 
table, and faces, at last consuming 
the photograph his wife had hung of him 
in his fullness, partner, pilot, father,  
man erect standing in the world.
                        

For most of the day, the fog lies
heavy on the Sound, thick gray cloth
settled tight over our loss, muffled 
lip of the Atlantic, tongue-tied 
voices of distant continents 
whispering grief, the line between 
being and not blurred by numbness,
listless lapping of labored waves
spilling absence onto the shore,  
we almost too weary to mourn. 
 
You were loud with laughter, 
clown-schooled, filled with comedy, 
present as the wind ripping through tall grass,
brash as a waterfall tumbling down our hungry lives, 
boisterous as the geese that patrol the shore,
heads high on upstretched necks,
looking every bit like you on a unicycle
scanning the horizon for the next adventure,
your face a sunburst repelling
silence with your full-throated voice. 
 
Late in the day, the sky reopens, 
custard-colored clumps of coastal rock 
splashed yellow by the new sun
thrust the land’s bright fist hard against
the water’s blue slate, waves crash back, 
pushed by the wind, pulled by the moon,
the old war between land and sea, 
silver spray lashing stone, low dirge 
giving way to our wailing, your laughter 
loud against our chorus of grief.