If you make a connection between this bench
and that bench, then you will remember
your grandfather’s footsteps on concrete,
the long shuffle of his shoe, and from there,
the smell of Shanghai air. You are seven
and when you went overseas to pick him up
you said you’d show him the white box house
and trim lawn. There are sidewalks
you can walk on. Everything is safe and calm—
the world disinfected.
Your grandfather stays in the house,
throat constricted by language.
He doesn’t like how meat is packaged here,
the heads of fish severed off. The people
on the street too polite to speak,
they cross the road. As if leaving space
were a gift of anonymity. When he walks,
he doesn’t see the thin borders
of land between white and green. He sees
neighbors blowing smoke rings and
the house where he goes to play poker
each day at four. He sees loudness
and fried dough by the street, the gritty
crunch of gravel under his feet. He sees
the bench where he slipped your father
gifts of stories that breathed in ink
brushstroke calligraphy, not the bench
where you and he sit silently,
the sterilized letters of u and s and a
between you.
