-lone wolf / this way to grapevine- 

I was told my maternal grandfather

was a young, apprentice shoe-maker in the old country;

Lucca, Italy, near the western coast of the Ligurian Sea.

this was told to me by my aunt Antoinette Toni, years after his death.
for reasons unknown to me now,
I assumed he was a potato farmer in the old country.

but he lived his adult life, (all of my childhood

from birth through grade school) the family patriarch, residing
in the great interior of the house which housed the lot of us.

and of course, occupying the exterior, too.

there, he cultivated grapes from a tangled overhead vine

built before he came to this place.

but it was he, who tended the vine, pressed its grapes
into a sweet, dark red wine from his cellar, eventually
funneling the port into long necked, black-glass bottles.

a dank, midnight grey hangs in the air down there.

old stone and mortar walls crumbling,–– still holding.

a giant plaster-cased furnace defunct as a coal burner,

the floor, a dense, black, moist earth.

next to the press, a great cask and next to the cask

a discarded kitchen stool which held a small drinking glass.

It will take another poem to describe this glass.well, to begin,

the glass was used daily to sample the wine from the cask;

a small amount for swishing and swallowing before the glass was

placed back upon the stool. It was never washed.

It will take another poem for a more detailed description.

Its title: “The Glass”

the grapevine also served as comfort shade

in the sweltering summer months where he, his wife, family

and friends socialized under its canopy; the resonance
of the Italian romance, the germanic

stringencies of English and the strains in broken English 

murmuring through the atmosphere.

the kids played in the yard, strolled through the craggy

vegetable garden catching hoppagrassers.

I remember a few metal

folding chairs, more straight-backs in wood

and an old, weathered picnic table which gave me splinters

with benches on each side, all of which were placed

across the cement foundation of the small pleasure-ground and
the scent of rainfall tapping the dense canopy of the leaves.