good things to own

 
a rust bucket flathead Ford and a well-honed block plane
a brass slide trombone in a case that smells like the jazz clubs used to smell

and four or five acres that don’t carry a mortgage
and a “free-to-a-good-home” sway back donkey
and a garage sale Stetson they let go for a dime

sometimes you know when something fits in your life
sometimes you don’t and it slips away before you do
like twenty-two months of sobriety

like the trench art cannon shell your granddad brought home from WWI
or the book of Walt Whitman poems he read and then read again
while the tremors of Parkinson’s ravaged his life

and then there’s the one thing you will never own but you wish you could
the thing Walt Whitman wove into those poems before he sent them into the world
the thing your granddad tried to give you, but you turned your back