untitled (adjustment)

After last Sunday’s memorial ritual,
only dance could release the enzymes
that turn grief into a citrusy meringue.

And 12 hours after that trance, my muscles
seized on the stillness of aftertimes,
stalwart through pain’s harangue.

This creaky morning I guessed 1997, fall,
as the time Zeda, my grandpa, lay supine,
his soles and my belly conversing in a language

invented mythic eras past. Breema, it’s called.
My wife-to-be demonstrated its inclines.
Zeda and I: a waterwheel in the Yangtze.

For 80 years, no message befell Zeda Paul,
but his body opened, proving simplicity sublime.
His form, the cello, and mine, the bow, sang.

Now with all those calendar grid lines fallen
and rigor mortifying the tissue that grips my spine,
Juliet’s dead mother and Zeda met in a tango,

came down in the veil at dawn’s inkling of pall.
Zeda bent to heal me, sighing a sign.
My vertebrae tapped a tambourine.

His presence tick-tocked craniosacral
equilibrium into my body as I slept in timeless
proximity to the true truth about the great ring.