MEMORIES OF MY GRANDFATHER

Memories of my Grandfather

Mustache wet with applesauce,
“A chip and a chair
is not loss.”

Packing his pipe with loose leaves,
“Give your anger space
to just breathe.”

On the phone, just yesterday,
“I once knew someone
by that name.”

The backyard calls of
mourning doves.

A woolen scarf that doesn’t itch

When I was fifteen,
a locust shell clinging
to the underside of a broad leaf,

I told you I wasn’t sure
I loved you anymore.

At thirty-three,
on the worst week of my life,
you tell me that the elephant
ears we dug up from our memory
garden and rerooted in stone
planters for our front porch

are being very dramatic.

Life is not as fun
without you
is what I sometimes mean
when I tell you I love you.

Love,
expressed with full consent,
is drinking in fresh air and
getting drunk off moonlight.

A cartographer’s caravan in Candyland

I move my gingerbread pawn
from an orange square
to the nearest purple

then resist
the modern urge
to check my phone
the primal urge
to check the sunset
the post-postmodern urge
to reference Mr. White
losing a game of chess
to his son.

I wish
I could sit
and exist.

Sawyer laughs.
His gingerbread pawn travels
a meandering path
across Gumdrop Pass
back to Peppermint Forest
all the way to Molasses Swamp
close to Candy Castle

before being
the original settler
of Lollipop Woods.

In the prime of my primal youth
I would cross state lines
on a whim.

No Siri to serve as Sherpa—
I sojourned, guided by spontaneity,
the god of Somewhere.

#

Starlight was intoxicant
not because starlight represented
something,
but because starlight represented
nothing

other than starlight
which was enough.

Detritus

When I checked on my neighbor Joe
after the tornado hurled a massive oak
into the lap of his living room,
he offered me kettle coffee.

Our front yard is turned into a jungle
gym of snapped branches where Sawyer
plays American Ninja Warrior.

The transformer, sparking in the rain,
sets a water maple ablaze.

We clear the debris
and dislodge broken boughs,
some buried six feet deep—
our hands wet with the smell
of sawdust and chainsaw grease.

Joe’s oak immovable, we clear what we can.
In his backyard, the magnolia
is a ground nest for
pterodactyls. Our fence,
fallen planks
for future fires.

In the driveway, we survey a convoy
of fire trucks. Our outskirt road
as crowded now as last year when
chemical flames sank their teeth into
the Boo Radley house next door
where squatters cooked crystal meth.

Our other neighbor
texts to ask when
we plan to remove the detritus
that the storm moved from our yards
to hers.

#

The massive oak trunk,
destructive as a mammoth’s tusk,
still rests in Joe’s yard.

His petunias, crushed.
The cinder block skeleton of his home, cratered.

Red Cross volunteers have turned
off the beaten track once every day
to bring water and sandwiches.

John Wise is a middle school English teacher living in Florida. Whether writing on his own or when working with his students, he promotes writing that is deeply rooted in curiosity, collaboration, and the sheer joy of creating. John has poems forthcoming in Midsummer Dream House, Teach. Write., Wingless Dreamer Publications, and Disjointed Lit.