Handfuls

I pick blueberries the same way I hold my grandmother’s

hand as we walk across the asphalt parking lot to Benihana’s,

Pressing gently, testing the strength of peeling blue skin.

There are many ways to love a person and only some will break them down, like my grandfather,

who knows me in sneezes,

knows me in the contours of my shoulders,

pictures my six-year-old self licking a lemon popsicle on the hot stone bench

outside Brookside gardens, a day before he went in for the surgery

that left him blind, feeling our hair for height when we visit.

At mealtimes, his plate is a clock.

My father spoons fried rice at three o’clock

and red vegetable curry at eleven o’clock,

and as I sit across the table and watch him, I wonder if he is okay, my father,

who cried for the first time that day

when he left the hospital,

me upstairs, throwing

a rubber ball into a hoop fitted onto the frame

of my bunk bed, that was how he found me, and that was where I learned

that tugging on the hem of a crying man’s navy T-shirt,

asking “What’s happening?” only makes him cry harder.

A frail hand, blueberries spilling, a melting lemon popsicle.

An unraveling navy T-shirt.

I cup my hands and despair that they cannot hold more.