June morning. Sunlight flashes through the pines.
Blue jays razz and bicker, perch on a fence post
back of my grandfather’s yard. His stripped engines
clutter the lawn. And everywhere the taste
of scuppernongs just moments off the vines,
so sour that you would swear the mind has traced
a pathway through the thicket, swear the past
comes clear again, picked piecemeal from the dust—.

Or else it’s late—September—and the shade
thicker than I recall: those cardinals,
finches or mockingbirds still haven’t made
a sound all afternoon, though ripe fruit swells
on bough, or branch—or bramble. Thus the frayed
edge of recollection slowly ravels
away to nothing, until that place is gone
where the heart would know its object, and be known.

All right. Not to begin with those backlit pines,
those scuppernongs, the jay perched on a branch
of sweet gum—no, oak, I think. With what, then?
With my grandfather holding a torque wrench
or ratchet? Some old engine’s stammer and whine
before it starts, or doesn’t—a house finch,
singing or silent? Language, too, seems wrong,
though it’s all I have. Grandfather. Scuppernong.

To fix him in some moment, word for word,
that man who taught me gears and cylinders, sweat,
precision of machinery—the hard
love of assembling things.
I know the heat
all summer hung like a scrim where pistons fired
and the boy I was watched in the raw sunlight.
Spilled oil rainbowed in its shallow pan.
One bird call, maybe; fruit on a trellised vine . . .

Impossible not to change things, move the words
from here to there. It’s late now. Nothing’s settled—
not engine noise or the sound of one far bird
the mind sings true. Which version of the world
should I believe? This morning in the yard
scuppernongs hang and sweeten. Pine boughs yield
some fragment of the blue jay’s call, a sound
the resonant air repeats but cannot mend.