is always second-hand. Always a distant spiral,
a curling sign. Even if we breathe it,
we keep only vestiges, carbon particles freed
from wood or leaves, spinning into our ignorant lungs. My grandfather,
an acre away, stirred a black pot spidered
over an open fire,
and no one can tell me
what he mixed or even if I dreamed it. (I remember the screened-in porch,
mud pies, a gourd dipper in a granite bowl;
I remember purple vetch,
its tickle infinitely preferable to the cobwebs and the dark and the stench
not even lime could cover.) He’d wanted to be a lawyer
but became a drunk instead. Or so I am told. I never saw him
drink. Never saw him hit. My mother
has his toolbox, and his hammer in it. She keeps his chalkline
(lead weight on blue string to mark the cut) and his spirit
level (splintered wood and oily bubbles)
atop his chest. I have a picture—he’s carving
ham on the woodstove, I’m standing on a chair beside him, wearing red plaid and crinoline—
and my mother’s word
that he favored me. I don’t remember
his voice. I never held the books he read, double-helixed in the smoke-
house. My mother said “snakes” so I could not turn
the pages, see his words, know what he knew, match my fingerprints
to his. I never saw the rugs he braided,
couldn’t ravel them, thumb denim and plaid flannel, read
the flat twist, the tight coils
he’d wound himself. I don’t know if it hurt
him to slaughter hogs, to open their throats with a butcher
knife while my mother cowered in the house, fingers in her ears, blocking
sound. Never knew his recipe for smoking hams. No way to know if he spoke
before he died, pulled over on the mapled vein of country road,
breathing blood while October burned.