Here is the dusk with its pink plastic bag
in the tines of a branch, the wheeze

in the wind's throat before the wind lies
down on water. Here is the brink
revealing the icy spring's pulmonary
green, the grasses softly becoming.

The water is like the dark part of an x-ray
sheet, possessing into itself
the shadows building between trees, shrubs
roundly black like pots. Traced

onto nothing, here is my grandfather
pushing breath out of his locking
lungs, and memory dividing like his cells:
the papery, hollowed-out face;

the brown mash of herbs he sipped, trying
to outwit what had lodged there,
the crone of another self, the enraged
sibyl shrinking, taking the world

of him with it. It is stupid to keep seeing
the body in the world, its parts
illuminated in the easy salary of images:
hospital tubes in the coiled garden

hose, the plastic bag in the tree waiting
like a lyre. And yet by these errors
what's beneath is sometimes fathomable:
you running on the Potomac's banks,

your lungs pumped with the medicine that
cures you as it didn't my grandfather,
the rain drumming mist out of the ground,
the mud a gradually clinging weight.

Heading back, you decide to scale a country
club's wall, diving naked into
the unguarded pool to wash off the mud.
You tell me this as I try to unfurl your

hands, and you finally open them, showing
damage that a door or hammer has
brought on each knuckle, the outlasting scars
coarse as the nodes on a branch.