The guitar I took from Grandpa’s closet
is nearly 80 years old. The strings
can’t be much newer; I never saw
or heard him play, what with the
arthritis and all.

Guitars are not like violins:
they peak and fail after a time.
There’s no such thing
as a three hundred year old
perfect player; their voices fall
into wisps of their former roar.

Gramps was like that too, or so I’m told;
numbers runner, bookie, bootlegger
in the secret room downstairs. We found
a small revolver flocked green with corrosion
in a grape crate after he was gone, pulled
strips of paper with forgotten debts
from crannies in the stone walls. Hard to imagine
what he must have been like, since all I knew of him
was the wheelchair, the voice so crusted with emphysema
he was barely intelligible, the branch-crooked fingers
and the bottle of Old Grandad next to his bed.

I check out the instrument, get it close to tune,
draw a G-chord from the fragile box. Surprise myself
when the tears come to my eyes. Surprise myself
when I try to recall the melody to “Stagger Lee”
and try to play it though I knew the strings might snap
and cut me if they fly unbridled through the air
into the wet skin of my cheek. Surprise myself
when I say to myself, “I don’t care,” and
keep on puzzling out that old outlaw song.

She
is at last upon
the throne of
comfortable
new.
Formerly
abraded
by wind
and steady
insult, she
imagined
a lotion
that soothed
below skin-
deep, and
it happened.
Others wanted
it, she held it
for her own,
and now she
is on the throne
of comfortable
new skin.
Sometimes,
selfish
heals. Some-
times, it
is not selfish
at all.