Benign

Knowing me, when he passes, I'll be exhaling
curls of confused vapor,
benign clouds unraveling above my dry, sightless eyes,
stinging, stinging.

My memory will be a hamster navigating a wheel.
Occasionally, it will stumble to soulless wood chips, frigid plastic,
then remount its goalless treadmill, relentless,
trapped in its small cage

where he is not ill, eighty-seven years old,
slipping away. For about an hour, he is not my grampa;
there are no good chuckles, no politics or cartoons, no
Orange County Registers in the mail, no loving notes attached;
nor claustrophobic walkers, overwhelmed spouses, shower doors
through which to collapse onto hospital beds -
no baseball in the backyard with my brothers -
he does not exist.