Buttering my morning toast, I use her knife
with the yellow bakelite handle
and, for a moment, my grandmother is here with me,
shuffling in her paisley housedress
across my kitchen forty years after her death.
It is November, month of her birth in 1895.
Leaves from the big maples are the yellow
of the knife’s bakelite handle and the yellow
of the feathers of the china hen that perched
on her shelf, yellow of the linoleum floor
where I took my first steps. Yellow
like the pear on my window sill.