I.

My Grandpa’s house is clothing for a ghost.

Do you recall the time bears got inside,
unlatched the pantry door, but couldn’t solve the cans?

No more do I.
That’s something Grandpa saw, or says he saw:

The cans were dented, scattered,
labels shredded, and intact though battered.

Later, when he opened one,
the peaches tasted sweeter than they had,
and smelled like honey, heavy on the tongue.
You could rest your head back,
shut your eyes and swear you heard bees hum, you could taste the sun,
open your throat and feel the sweetness run.

So Grandpa told me many times,
as if the tale were true,
as if there had been bears in his New Hampshire youth.

II.

One day the rain made mud and pulled it through the town.
It was his mother’s garden drew it down,
the way the pansies dried and cried for dew,
the way the robin redbreast wove its nest,
back when the world was new.

He was a boy like you then, wild and young,
the future bears of story yet to come.

III.

But anyway, he didn’t die there by the lake.
He died in town, and his old house
is just another place.
It doesn’t hold his ghost.

That, like the bears, the rain,
like all of that,
the half-remembered jokes
are just a midden of his past,
and mostly balderdash,
confused and dis-caboobalated, as he’d say.

IV.

Paddy me boy, he’d say, Don’t shill for sense
or value history over eloquence.

I didn’t go out when he died
to stand with Father at the cold hole’s side
or read the requiescat on the stone.
I bought a can of peaches, and stayed home.

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