Communion

It's cool
the way a basement is in August
dark except for one small window
floating high above us
like in church
the bottom half cut off by grass

the only other light's a bulb
tiny as a child's night-light
mounted on a grinding wheel
bolted to a workbench

Frank's showing me the way
to sharpen a lawn mower blade
he's 80 and my mom's boyfriend
I'm 40 and he's probably
the nearest to a dad
I'll ever have

he touches steel to stone
and like a sparkler
fireflies shoot in a stream
that flows a couple feet
before dying

the noise is swordplay or
my cousin working on a car
and lasts a second in my head
after Frank has stopped
to check his work

he says the different colors
come from different minerals
in the metal
that the sparks
are like our lives
a bit of light that flies

while the words themselves
hang in the air like bits of ash
before we go upstairs again
to finish cutting grass
the taste of matches
carried on our tongues
like wafers as we trudge
back towards the sun

Grape Jam

I was helping Grandma make grape jam
mostly I was helping her remember
what we'd done and what came next
sitting at the kitchen table
popping wild dark grapes
out of their slippery skins
adding sugar and Sure-Jell
cooking them so many minutes until
we poured the sticky darkness into jars
sitting on a breadboard

I'd take each batch into the living room
so Grandma'd have more room to work
setting the jars on a card table
by the TV to cool
the TV kept showing a tape loop
of two airplanes crashing into
buildings in New York
the bodies falling endlessly
the way we do in dreams
everything repeating
every time she heard the popping
of a metal lid announcing
that another jar had sealed
Grandma'd say
the Japs are bombing us again
her brother's death in World War Two
somewhere in the future
Normandy a funny word
nobody in Milwaukee knew

pouring the next to last batch
I told her this was different
but she said the dead
are just as dead
no matter what the TV says
then she turned the TV off
like God commanding darkness by remote
knocking a jar off the table by accident
both of us just sitting there a moment
watching darkness seep across the old linoleum

Poems ©Copyright by Michael Kriesel