It’s an Ektachrome slide of my grandfather
in his early nineties, hoeing his sweetcorn patch
on a hot summer day, the photograph bleached,
the plants like pale green fountains falling
back, a billed cap cooling the top of his face,
bib overalls and workshirt damp and salty
even at this distance, sixty years from then.
He didn’t look up to see me there, taking
his picture. He was looking for weeds, not
immortality, but this stamp-sized piece
of color film and three grown grand-children,
all in their seventies now, have given him
another fifty years to be remembered,
the blink of an eye. And here he is, bent
in his garden, chopping away at his weeds,
reaching out with his hoe and hooking it
into the earth and pulling himself forward,
like a man standing up in a rowboat, a few feet
from the future, tossing a rope to the shore.