break - the chair

A bowlegged chair -
all redwood pressboard, green cushions plumped -
rests next to the cling-clang washer,
waiting for its owner to return.

The owner, my grandfather, once needed no chair,
once threw baseballs like the bullets he carried,
sweet shrapneled souvenirs from a Pacific campaign,
mementos for a life passed away,
wiled away on an auto assembly line
eight hours at a time.

The chair was the latest in a long line of evolution
dated from before the war,
before thirty-eight years of Lucky Strikes:
the child of when he met my grandmother
which was birthed as he returned from the war
that gave him, in order:
malaria
shrapnel
and a good left eye exchanged for one of glass,
sealing a childhood shut
the day that Fate
(in the form of a draft number)
tapped him on his shoulder.