Stenciled Memories

for Gra'ma There was always fabric in your lap and a whistle in your heart. A sweet sap to be sucked waited in the garden. Nymphs of newts nestled under rock, your role as She Who Brings the Waters intact. Between the trilling of the crickets educating into the night and the sad sack of cans in the mornings something grew, flourished in the dark — vines as sturdy as telephone wire writhed in the breezes. You patched together a blanket of us, sewed together the mismatched and lopped off edges. And anger grew a twin, ripped through the bermuda grass, something stubborn and determined: Me, in a leather patchwork skirt, the bitter lemon song returning to its beginning over and over on the Howdie Doody phonograph, a handful of bandages, a faceful of ghosts delivered from the mirrors. How did you stand it? All of it. Us crunching through your set life, kids scuffling through the mounds of leave. Always making do. Your sunshine eyes, those stenciled memories where we still live.