The cheesesteak I cooked for him,

Like biting through steel, he said.

I want to live another five years

so the grandkids can remember me.

I saw photos on Facebook at Tres Magaritas,

his cheeks a mine, excavated,

his smile stilled by the camera.

It has been a year—over a year!—

since the suits, shirts, and shoes

given away to close friends,

since the casseroles, late night tea.

His eight-minute drive

he took for decades to NCAR,

right turns on Heidelberg,

Lehigh and Table Mesa

became frontiers and scouts

for the Civil War,

his hospital room,

a rundown mountain hotel.

My son swipes through photos

on my phone. Grandad, he says.

The sharks swim in a luminous

blue glass taller than his outstretched arms.

I can still smell the peat

from the Lagavulin we drank together,

his oak and hay cough, his heavy pour,

like the magazine renewal emails

I get from the New Yorker

long after his death.

I want to email those fucks back

and say it was a Christmas gift,

you fuck, he’s dead I can’t buy him

another year for sixty percent off.