A Vagrant
by Stephen M. Sanders
My grandfather often walks
about my mental backwoods
just before I sleep. In the shades,
he looks, but does not speak.
There, he has the similar slanted
shoulder, the slow scoliotic limp; square jaw.
But, the frames of his glasses might be different–
wire instead of plastic. His hair is changed. Today,
it is blue-black, not silver. Sometimes, it is buzz-cut.
Other times, he even wears an earring.
When I am awake I can never recall
his living details: old conversations, direct looks
into the eyes. Videotapes remember, though,
his sermons in church–a Texan lilt
with two giant hands moving
above a lectern.
Years after he left me, I left him, his lilt, his lectern,
left his sermons, thinking he didn’t know any better;
that death had left him dumb, sightless,
or ceased–stirred away.
But each night he waits and I hold
my ears harder against the lectern,
and though silent at dusk, he refuses
to let me, his youngest grandson,
the youngest to remember,
resign him finally to relic.
Stephen M. Sanders is an assistant professor of English at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas. He has had poems included in publications including Pacifica Literary Review, Penumbra Literary & Art Magazine, and the Austin International Poetry Festival di-vêrsé-city anthology. His first novel Passe-Partout was published in 2019 (Monument Place Books).
