I communicate on his terms; call
on before after days of celebration; visit
mostly in the silence of being present; listen
to occasional stories of sudden remembrance
of surface dwellings never deep rarely about the
familial unit that was the first in which
we are the last; he is the last to hold my story of
a youth soon only known to me, a youth spent
grasping to manifest a thing I never knew
a thing others called family
