I crushed my cigarette into the

safety of flat, white ashes, watching 
the smoke tread up among 
clouds creased into these
craven shapes that
gingerly fade and
escape the sky—and
muscled up out of the
white-knuckled, cloud-muzzled, 
muttering sunrise, some 
quaint cut of an epitaph’s 
cousin:
 
Mold grown over the 
mold again—note
 
What blistering gifts
entrained in a thumb-
print, callused from
picking at so many
bolts, stripped
 
all of it soft as the
shirts that my grandmother’d
offered me, dregs of a dew-damp 
aside, those 
delicate flannels
my grandfather no longer
fit in—as well as a pair of white
oversized socks that had haughtily 
disregarded the fact that my foot was
larger than what strange he squeezed 
in a work boot.
 
                              —
 
My grandfather’d kept a bramble of anvils
thumbtacked together to shoulder a shed.
 
Each house he’d had, four
mortgages coldly afforded from
whispering proverbs to pistons, wearing
incomparable thumbprints down into
black-iron casts of milk glass-smooth tonsures 
from loosening lockjawed bolts and Heineken caps,
from sussing the sweat and the schmutz 
from an engine; had 
   each a similar shed, 
you’d dare not mention
aloud for fear of it filling with 
dybbuks reduced to 
woodgrain gusseting 
ribs of young Bluebeard’s
           bloated potato barn—once,
 
he ushered me over to witness 
the door uncurl from its verdigrised hinges, and
                 rolled out a rusted patio table like
          Sisyphus taking a day at the races. He
 
always wore these paper-frail v-neck tees
and jeans to cover his crepe-paper body. He,
well into his sixties, still could calmly suspend himself
straight from a t-boned fence post, perfectly
level with earth, even given its 
gaily lazing curve, yes, perfectly
 
parallel. Parallel meaning that he and the
 
earth should never meet, for a moment, the
two of them damn near perfectly twain, except
for the stock stiff fencepost spelling out mercy 
or mercy me, maybe, too deep in the flickering
woodgrain, really, for anyone willing to see it—
 
He gave me the patio table to salve and
sell as a vessel of oenomel vintage. He’d
 
never quite found the time to refurbish it. There- 
by the anvils staked their claim, and I asked,
 
amid a frank flurry of each of his 
four hunched children scribbling
names on an orgy of moldering heirlooms,
 
What’s with all the anvils, Papaw?
You can’t have my anvils, he mercifully
muttered. No, really, I spluttered, why 
 
all the anvils—now, this old
 man that my father (his former
 son-in-law) commonly
 muttered of, clambering 
 praise, your grandfather works
              like an animal; this small 
                                          man, whose
                                          legs, reflecting 
                                          a maglite, just 
                                          might elbow a 
                                          hole in the Hoover 
                                Dam, this man, who
spent every cheeseparing hour 
immersed in a moat of work
with a snorkel of maybe 
two Heinekens nightly, told me,
colder than stars collapse, I wanted
 
to take up blacksmithing—albeit 
I’d yet to find the time for it.
 
                                  It recalled
my father’s father once confiding
in me (a seduction, really, that led 
to him asking me, telling me, You, yes,
you should chronicle [what was] my life),
 
that Arlene, my father’s mother (replaced
by Darlene, some years later) had wanted for years
to be but a dressmaker—that, evermore tacitly
tragic still, that he, whose life had demanded
a chronicle, went to my local baker and said,
 
you should train me. The Baker said, no.
You wouldn’t much like it. I asked him again,
and we’ll leave it at that. He’s retired and
 
twice now, once
as a cop and once
as a, what’s the politest way to say it, a
corrections officer, a
                                          prison guard, left
 
whittling down his 
ribs and knees with
a sharpened spoon he’d
honed upon how many
broken bowls of spaghetti-
ing dreams drawn up in a listess
bone-braced cyst. At twenty,
he’d sired two children already.
 
A tidldibab is, of course, an invented name 
for a bone with a hole in it somebody took
for an heirloom instrument, one that be-
queathed the urge to make music out
of, well, just about anything really—
 
That was the mold
grown over with
mold again: note
 
what blistering gifts
entrained in a thumb-
print, callused from
picking at so many
bolts, stripped.