Your grandson is struck sterile
among choices you have left behind.
The compass that carried you through Eagle Scouts is gone;
the badges worn across your chest, dust like the degree from Harvard.
I am a cold point beneath the winter sky,
a dust mote upon a string played obligatto between galaxies,
and soon enough there will be no mountain meadows
for your descendents to walk among.

Darkness burns away on the wings of a moth
flaring itself into a place you have come to know.
The maples I climbed on have gone,
with no more power in their roots to shade your window.
The driveway I carried your suitcase along that last day
has been blacktopped three times that I know
and the weeping cherry you never knew was planted
by my son whom you never knew
and dwarfs a house on the other side of town.

You knew the lady slippers and May apples,
showed me where tiger salamanders lay beneath logs,
called ground cover by all its varied names
spoke 16 languages and read from the books of the dead,
strode with an urgency through urban forests
and took the train to work each day. Tickets, getting
tickets please. Sandwiches in paper bags.

The aurora borealis blows through the cells of my bone,
igniting them so that they are torn apart and scattered in the solar wind.
What was it that you wanted to achieve. Why
did we wear our tight shirt collars to expensive hotels
or spend long years sweating our fears into foreign sheets.
I am older now then you were when on that day
you lay down in a blueberry patch and died
on vacation beneath a Minnesota sky.

After the stroke, we had three days before you rose,
and the light in your eyes seemed to go on forever without finding words.
In listening ever since among the stars, I have been paralyzed
and have raised flawed children who are as wise as you
with no desire to pass it on.

Jared Smith