Have you ever listened to Coltrane’s Love Supreme,
where Pursuance crawls into Psalm? The bass is still speaking
its younger lines, though no one listens till it’s almost quiet.
There’s a rumble from the toms, and a swell of resurgent memories.

Psalm is what it sounds like when your grandfather dies on morphine
—a tenor sax of muddled thought the thick of meds,
the spasm of cold liquid as it shoots to the arms, to the eyes,
masking a daughter’s face with visions of Normandy.

I know the smell of my grandfather’s dying days—
weak without the bourbon tobacco sting to water my eyes,
but sincere enough to tell the stink of etherization.

If I could swim through a cloud of Dutch Masters now,
I would never wash my hair again. he smell of Grampa—
in his lawn chair—a solitary figure guarded by his parejo.