Grandfather, before the stroke that stole his
mind and movement, would walk me through the stones
inscribed with lives and set mostly in rows
with occasional deviations—this
to prove that something still here lives. He read
to me the names and numbers and hard-pruned
poems, whose long, more ample branches lay strewn
in unseen hearts, while we walked past the dead
friends we had never met. Rarely, or so
I remember, did one seek the other’s
hand; I look on us now more as brothers
too wide apart in years to really know
how to play together. Now he is where
he walked me, with the unmet friends we share.