In Memory of My Grandfather

In the river where you went fishing, crayfish Trailed foetal white at the edge of the brown sluggish current. Behind the iron railing trees grew too dense for deep shade. You used doughballs for bait, crayfish lacking, and were gone all afternoon, Returning, often as not, laden with carp, Your eyes unladen. Such was your decline.

Your eyes affirmed that the burden of eight children Constrained but did not depress the unwizened Indeterminate set, scarce darkened by age, Of their steel gray answer to grandchildren and strangers. Sent into the world too young by your father's drink, You avoided drink, from that Tennessee moved north, Had a family, and ended up papering houses, Then lived out the long rest of your life on a pension, Fishing, or in the back room of the poolhall, over cards. You dealt, it was dealt, unbearably equally. Yet your gray coevals told at a Reunion How once, when young, in the forest, you found a honey tree . . .

Who was bugler at the full military funeral The Legion gave you? Or was there a bugler? Your war was over, bugler, before you got to it. Back home, still, you lived decades on the memory of bugling, On the government pittance for it, and taught me to bugle As Memorial Day you bugled in the same town graveyard Where veterans of a war without bugles have borne you, your survivors.