Dry days without sleep, I shut the window and my eyes to study a Polaroid. It would’ve been a Polaroid. Grandfather Gus is breaking rocks in that corner over there. I gesture beyond my darkness to where the bureau now sits. A concave back arches toward the camera, leaning over, over. Sweat soaks the springy teal nap, stirring seeds. One thousand real miles away, Gus’s grass thins like a businessman’s temple. No one ever visits.
 
The taker would’ve lounged here, away from the sick-making sun, snapping languid studies of a man’s strange labor. To break rocks in a bedroom. It resumes all, its lonely crushing. I have only the corner, his face averted, his purpose averted. In truth, if I can claim a piece, it could be any room. Any taker. The flash freezes the sledge at apogee, a blur grazing spackled white, southward of an unseen fixture.
 
I hear grandmother Sue laundering in the mud room, wearing noise-cancelling headphones. No. Not in Ike’s years, the interstate just born. She must have borne the sedimentary crush with skepticism cultivated in her Great, Depressed youth. I know nothing of eras, not my own. I never go out. Where the mud used to be, there’s a scuff. Where my face was, the attempt.
 
My own folks live outside Des Moines, a city squarely inside the country. If I called for back-up, Mom’s photographic memory would erase what I see. No rocks in the bedroom, no real reason her father kept on. Mine is a burnt land where searing parking lots made me try dog boots. And my brothers, what can I say of them except I have none, never did? Brothers to wing rocks at, sharp-edged missives.
 
There are so many things I’ve never had. Caramel apples, park-bench carvings, samples of China, rocks, wood, an inch of God’s beard, a talent or known fear, names for a daughter. It’s easy to list and never cross off, never to list, to walk westward inside, toward the trees, a purpose, to dig with a rake, a spoon, whatever’s there. To look.
 
What Gus had I base on this photo, freshly taken. It argues boundless drive bordered by sleep, manual dust on the finery, fragments of cooled volcano embedded in wallpaper, a wife in flight to and from his foundry man’s form. Revealed in the vanity, he rubbed those inorganic materials into life, into us, into me. I knew him as a splash of Afta, a comb balanced on the sink. But that was later, late.