Past the apple trees where we’d stopped to taste
the half-ripe fruit that later made us suffer
colon-cramping belly-aches, I’d run to grandpa’s creek
not to swim but to look across at the used up
cornfield where the meadow grass was beginning
to take over, remembering the stalks
that once towered above a seven-year-old.
It was a land given back, no longer
a hub for human sustenance, but a homebase
for field life roving and free of interference.

Grandfather’s house sat on an acre and a half
of country, backed up to a creek the size of a drainage ditch,
where I’d hop down from the eroded dirt ridge
onto a rock that cut the flow of the measly waterway
right down the middle. The minnows would swim
around it as I watched them, wavering
with the movement of the dirty curling creek,
so little yet host to so much life. I would reach
down to touch them but they wanted no part.

And the hot humid air would attract
the mosquitoes as the sun fled from above,
giving me an itch and the dragonflies
a meal. Grandpa would holler back at me
from his patio porch with a cigarette
in his hand—he’d call out my name. Only
faintly would I hear the voice of my mother’s
father beckoning me to the dinner table,
where we would eat, talk about the sun and the stars,
and afterward retreat to the driveway’s
still-cooling summer asphalt for a quick
game of 21 before the sun went down.

by Ryan Wilcox