My grandfather was never more
than a tale passed down in
black and white pictures.
As a child I shifted through
the stories of a dead man who
put up with California
long after the gold dried out
and the missions became museums,
only to retire to a living room
in the sprawled suburbs with a black
and white television and children
drafted to Vietnam.
And now, his ghost
leans over my shoulder
to rewrite his past.
He uses my hands to script legend
into history; reclaims the antiquity
prescribed in blood.
What tools are needed to build a man?
A few oral histories and
anecdotes shared on holidays.
A signature from Elise Island,
some pictures of a second wife
whose never returned from their honeymoon,
A book published in the 1940’s
and a short story my father wrote
about finding him near death
The handful of knowledge given
to me doesn’t differentiate between fact
or fabrication, truth or invention.
No one ever told me why
he came to America or why
he ended up in the West, when
the rest of the cousins rested on
the East coast. No one told me why
a 44 year old man from across
the ocean would take a 22 year old
girl from her home and bring her up to
a country she had never before seen.
Perhaps he believes I will
stack stories of glory and
wisdom out of the tales past down
But he is not here to tell me what
I got right and what I got wrong,
and there are so many holes to explore.
He didn’t realize I had
the power to fill in
the missing pictures.
He didn’t realize the calluses
he created by embedding heritage
on freckled palms in absence of luck.
He never suspected the curiosity
stirring in the mind of a child
had the power to create or destroy
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