15

I will not think about Easter today.
I will not check again for the name of the plumber who hasn't come.

I will not look at the empty flowerpots or the knee-high wildflowers.
I will watch the cats threaten one another. I will not intervene.

I will listen to the tick tick of the plastic wall clock that was my grandmother's,
but I will not be bullied by it.

I will be lulled by it instead, hypnotized as I imagine my grandmother was,
my grandmother unbothered by time,

who crafted wall art out of tinfoil and markers, doilies, magazine clippings,
who asked me again, slower ... again, slower: would I like some juice,

leaning close until I could see the gauze pressing against
the left lens of her thick glasses, the gauze that packed the crater

where her eye once was, speaking slow and loud until I finally
unveiled the question shrouded in her surgically mangled voice,

my grandmother who never let my parents pull me from her dog's crate,
who understood why I would stay there, or who didn't like to tell me no,

who showed me rather than told me things,
who stood in the doorway in her quilted flannel coat and smiled big

so I could tell that she was smiling -- she always looked like she was smiling,
her face folding in on itself, collapsed by doctors and the cancer they removed --

as I made my way up her mountain, to the Blue Bird bus hiding in the woods,
to the tree with the twin trunks -- her tree, where we would in too few years

release her ashes, the first funeral of my life, and the model for mine:
few people, little talk, many trees, and some sunshine.