The woman in the other room is a grandmother.               A grandson watches a grandmother from darkness through a lit door.      A grandson knows nothing about a grandmother.      A grandmother arrived unceremoniously to a grandson who she has never met before.            The articles here confuse intimacy.             Though no one is heartless, this isn’t a feel-good situation where everyone is at odds with everyone at first but eventually finds in the other a kindred spirit.                     This is a story of complete hardness between a mother and a daughter.                A son who is a grandson must navigate the ancient rift between a daughter who is a mother and a mother who is a grandmother in a moment before leaving home to work for the Peace Corp in Botswana.         A grandson must not dig up the past.           A grandson fears not so much the person of a grandmother, who stands barely five feet tall and more often than not is lost in a daydream, as he does her temper.              When she speaks to him he feels held at gunpoint.                  A mother has a similar effect on a son.                     A grandson feels obliged to love a grandmother he has never spent time with.            One essential question is, ‘How can a grandson not know a grandmother?’                  This is one of the essential questions a son won’t ask a mother.             Another is how a mother comes to have so much power.                     A grandmother orders a grandson around like she has always lived there.  She makes him rewash all the dishes when she finds a spot on one.    She browbeats him into pounding out rugs with a broom or the pavement.          He must do not only his own laundry but also launder such fabrics of the common areas as curtains, slips, and covers.          A grandson and a grandmother both have deviated septa.                  If there is one way for them to commiserate with each other, a way more intimate than the rote cues they follow, it is a willingness to talk about nasal cycles.         To talk about their noses brings smiles to their faces.               A grandmother smiling is a major event for a grandson to witness.   A son tells a mother in private.                    If a grandmother wishes she could just leave sometimes, why not just leave sometimes?   If a grandmother adores color and figures, why not join an artists’ studio for the senior citizens?                    A mother asks a son to ride the bus with a grandmother to the rec center in the evening.               A grandmother with an evening activity needs a chaperone to arrive safely.  A grandmother makes a seascape one week and a herd of wild horses the next.                She paints a herd of mustangs from a photograph in a book that belongs to her instructor.           She paints halved apples and pots of flowers.             A grandson looks at these pictures and thinks he wouldn’t mind having one. A grandson thinks they might be worth something to someone. Because she finds other artists at the artists’ studio for the elderly insufferable, a grandmother paints one last still life, a view from a hilltop looking down upon the valley town in northern Italy where she was born, and puts her brushes away forever.      A grandmother claims she’s put her brushes away forever but it isn’t forever.              No one is lying but acting out emotion.                     A grandson sitting in darkness watches a grandmother through a lit doorway.                  She stands before the painting she calls “Asiago” with a brush in one hand and a palette of colors in the other. She touches it up as it hangs there, framed on the kitchen wall.  He doesn’t speak but jots down the changes she makes on the graph paper he used to use to diagram traffic flow on the streets of his neighborhood.                  He watches her painting over portions of her picture with things that could logically go there.      Their routine will go on like this for days and weeks and months, until the day he leaves for Africa.   He writes what’s missing and what’s new to the situation across the grid of his paper as if his words and phrases, like places and objects in the physical world, have fixed coordinates,

we’ll take the bus ride into the hills
follow the bridge out of this city
roll out on a morning like any other

my things are ready

hung on her wall otherwise bare
slopes foot the room for so long
hills not a thing like the ones first painted

set above our misplaced couch
a bowl of cloth flowers
a hat rack
plates in glass

even the cloth flowers

she sets up a fresh canvas every now and again
never makes a mark
I used to ask

I don’t ask her that anymore

last year the far away rectangles
the little patches of land
I noticed more yellow
a new cloud hung in the sky
a small house appeared on the horizon
I don’t know where these people come from

all blank except one

it’s getting darker

I still can’t explain the sun

running my hand over the brown hills
I remembered them green
and new shadows fell over ones there before
before the sun which today shines gray

or doesn’t shine at all