The Wake

Gravity tends to act
Immediately
Except when relationships are involved.

Atomic shivers probed my fingers and arms
As my fingers probed
The helmet’s hole.

This belonged to the German my grandfather killed.

I turned it over again in my
Young hands. I
Picked up swastikas, a toy tank, a bank,
A ring, such things as this.
This box wasn’t going to auction.

Neither were the guns.

But the rest of his life…
I had been to auctions. I know the sounds
They make and the smell of blue collars and pine.
Eighty years
And now he just sits confused in a chair
(We kept that from the auction too,
Along with a dresser and most of his tools.)

As I said before, I hadn’t known all this at the time.
All I knew then,
Running between homes,
Was a deep molecular fear
Of the day I turned to a page of my life
In a box
At the auction of my life
That I cannot remember and had barely begun to read.