my grandfather’s sketchbooks are stored in drawers,

full of the smell of granite,

and of the carpet in his living room,

where he’d teach us cartoons,

and we would drink Santa Claus coca-colas

by the tiny Christmas tree, in February.

never, I asked him how he felt

when he drew cartoons, charcoal on his fingernails,

when he lived in tents in the desert,

or in California where the earth shook and crack,

or his apartment, by the stockings in late winter.

instead, he asked me if I still believed in Santa,

and offered me fruit cake.

the cake was good, and I didn’t believe.

in a pink journal, I wrote lines that rhymed,

on that carpet,

and while I watched the Super Bowl in the hospital room,

and that last time, drinking orange slushies,

and on the back porch at the house

in the little town he grew up,

after the funeral.

sometimes I wonder if he had a dream or two,

as I we all do, I assume,

tucked into the corners;

the creases of the brain tissue that we

do not,

can not,

share, and I wonder,

if I might find them,

somewhere in his sketchbooks, or

perhaps he left them in some tent,

or crack of the earth,

or in his questions,

for my own sketches to find.