from Still

A Game of Catch

After the meal the den-warm faces

drowsing in lamplit velvet arms,

the kitchen sounds a soft staccato,

TV muted to a pantomime of

games dreamed almost remembered,

Grandaddy lying down again

of cancer in the back bedroom’s

yellow hush, a crack I sneak past

& out the sliding glass doors

to the slate patio where leaves

drop like mottled costume feathers

pirouetting from the dark attics

of the live oaks’ highest branches

black against a vaulted sky

leached cobalt-blue to rose

by late November, running till

I find him, far from the house’s glow,

brother to my mother, framed

by the same hand working me still

through bones’ ache & foundry

to that congruence, treading gloom

& roll, sure-footed of the course,

one of the Charlotte cousins with him,

moving farther off but keeping

a measure local to themselves

& compensating in it, rolling

with the counterpoint of sleeves,

white signals sent, received as he

hooks from the momentary stream

& cradles, bears it jogging

over lighter rough & onto the blue

swell of fairway, twisting in his run

to send it out again through darkness

toward the arms I now no longer

see but hear the sent thing arc

into that waiting, sing home snug,

their moving now gone ghost against

the night of trees, a hint or dream

of boots in wet grass, creak

of fingers gripping leather’s give,

the surge & snap of strength delivered,

the light, listening breath––

–first published in The Carolina Quarterly