I

My aunt called my uncle an alcoholic after he took
a four-hour brown-bottle nap inside a piece

of running machinery and was fired, which no one
agreed with, and my grandfather grabbed my sister’s breast

when she bent down to hug him goodbye, which no one
believed. My father, fists balled pink around the wheel, guiding us

home, past rows of dehydrated Illinois corn, vowed we wouldn’t
go there again until my grandfather died, but it wasn’t true. My mother

and father and even sister went back, my grandfather fell farther
into a grab-happy fog, which no one, barring my parents and sister,

found bothersome, and I stayed home, watched the house, ran
track meets, made high-school-empty-house love to a girl with yellow eyes

that I first planned to marry, and then, after mistakes were made
with my best friend, planned to murder, until I remembered the guilty fire

that frequented my chest every time I hit a Monarch with my car
or crushed a wolf spider through several layers of Kleenex.

II

My father gave the Eulogy for he was good at that sort of thing,
and said he would remember his dad at 40, fresh out

of the coal mine, teeth and ears and eye-circles covered
in gray film, hitting pop flies in the streets under the dying

summer light, sending each one over the power lines, every time
my father or his brother dropped one, their old man yelling

Catcha’ ‘da ball.  Catcha’ ‘da ball, the same brother
who was absent that morning, the same brother who fell asleep

in the 90-degree cab of a backhoe, idling until it ran out of gas,
the same brother who, as my sister and I left the cheap-glue

church basement carpet and the cold, post-funeral ham
to go outside, around back, under the hot blue sky to smoke

peach-flavored cigars, which I’d been saving for a rainy day,
we saw sitting on the rusted merry-go-round across the street,

taking pulls from a flask, who nodded our way as we filled
our lungs and watched the sun spark off the metal,

as we emptied our heads and watched the smoke roll
thick and gray like a storm around our skin.