Blazon for My Grandfather

My grandfather's jaw was a candelabra of melting teeth. His pickled tongue slept behind their burning wicks. His wisk broom mustache shook beneath a cobblestone nose. My grandfather's ukulele laugh would peel down wall-paper into a bed of bougainvillea, there we would sit, spinning him above us, skeletal helicopter, our faces to the cool breeze of his whale-tailed webs.

My grandfather's hands were gravel-gloved so that he could crush clouds into rain, so that he could grate granite with his palms, so that he could snake into blackberry dungeons and rescue the trembling fruit.

His cigarette legs would walk in circles through my grandmother, feeding her wine and walnuts, both in glass, ferociously fox-trotting her back to the flooded 40's, where tubes and oxygen, saliva streamers hung from champagne chandeliers.

My grandfather had tomato vine veins, vericose, very close to his straw-hat heart.

He woke up like a Fibonacci fountain, slept in the first and fourth quadrant of his Cartesian California king. He dreamed abundant vegetable dreams.

My grandfather's paper-thin skin held him together until, like all gifts, he was opened.