I open my eyes to find myself
returned. But for the mildewed moon,
the forest is concealed beneath a callous sky.
I discover what remains of him in a clearing.
She has exhumed him and taken his skull.
My Grandfather’s ribs lie on the earth,
a latticework of hoops and stringers —
the bones of a Currach once covered in animal hide,
cured in oak-bark and tar — a hull that ferried him
through eighty years and now laid bare.
She uses clay to reconstruct his face
in her family’s likeness, making him her lie —
his aquamarine eyes no longer carry the sea,
his smile no longer his. She whispers her alibi
into his left ear and a swarm of flies emerges from the other.
I long to steal him back, return him to his grav
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