Let’s hold hands for grace, he chirps,

let’s hold hands for joy.

Our touch of flesh flicks

round the room, then upward through

ancestral trees. High-booted

Carolina planters stare. Post-

Revolution veterans clearing

Ozark hills lean on their saws.

An antique motorcade

burps by, while squat Volhynian

exiles trudge through hedgerows to a

reedy Bessarabian bassoon.

Worlds shuffle off

and nothing now remains

of shaggy venturers -- their chattel fields,

rank brew-vats, shrieking textile mills --

or Philadelphia factories

wrung from Tsarist soil

yet still they congregate,

reclaimed one instant in a

small boy’s shining face.

Outside, deer nuzzle

young azalea blooms.

Our local red fox on its haunches,

lit by streetlight, grooms a paw.

It’s buoyancy

we’re grasping for

riding these hands

this quarter moon

a quiet sapphire sky.