3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN
It was the extraterrestrial Dick Solomon who taught me physics
and eulogy, that a man is a man until he’s a ripple of ether.
At my grandfather’s funeral, the priest had only been acquainted
with Grampi’s illness, the skin tightened over bone,
Parkinson’s that gripped him for a decade,
so he couldn’t eulogize
the rhinestone cowboy who had taught me to swim.
The priest went on about Jesus though I
would have preferred Grampi or Jean Luc-Picard
or even Dick Solomon, a man playing an alien playing a man,
foreign and familiar. It had been years
since Grampi had played anything save
invalid, then dead. He was a story
clicking through a filmstrip of memory, and yet,
Dick taught me that wasn’t all, that a lucent swirl
of my grandfather eddied on the sill, that he powered a spider
to the church’s ceiling where it hovered
over my head as a small, russet crown.
Grampi hung close for a while, clapping furiously
in maple leaves when the man I was seeing
didn’t like to kiss me goodbye or call when he’d promised.
The last thing Grampi had called me was Bacchian,
forest queen, deserving of everything. He is
stretched farther now, out to the Atlantic
into the mouths of gulls. Each time they open birds
to find bellies full of milk caps and Legos,
I’m sorry. I want to feed him potatoes
and chocolate cake or
my own children. My grandfather is
my favorite dead person, though many nice ones
fill the earth’s green slitherings and deserve kindness
on the fresh blades of their faces. The earth is lousy
with our dead, newly alive and burning,
choked with indignities and plastic beads.
When I water the succulents gathered at the kitchen window,
fleshy leaves fashion roots into my grandfather’s ear,
and Grampi inches upwards, listening. I whisper
over him, I will take care of you.
You’re safe to grow,
and he lets me lie to him,
practicing for my babies.