"Improv"-ing on Angie Estes' "Gloss"

Gloss
My mother said that Uncle Fred had a purple
heart, the right side of his body
blown off in Italy in  World War II,
and I saw reddish blue figs
dropping from the hole
in his chest, the violet litter
of the jacaranda, heard the sentence
buckle, unbuckle like a belt
before opening the way
a feed sack opens all
at once when the string is pulled
in just the right place:
the water in the corn pot
boils, someone is slapped, and summer
rain splatters as you go out
to slop the hogs. We drove home
over the Potomac while the lights spread
their tails across the water, comets
leaving comments on a blackboard
sky like the powdered sugar
medieval physicians blew
into patients' eyes to cure
their blindness. At dusk,
fish rise, their new moons
etching the water like Venn Diagrams
for Robert's Rules of Order
surfaced at last, and I would like to
make a motion, move
to amend: point of information, point
of order. I move to amend
the amendment and want
to call the question, table
the discussion, bed
some roses, and roof the exclamation
of the Great Blue heron sliding
overhead, its feet following flight
the way a period haunts
a sentence: she said that
on the mountain where they grew
up, there were two kinds
of cherries--red heart and black heart--both of them
sweet.

Improv
Grandpa ate gray
squirrel, chewing and swishing
without teeth, leaning
against the scratched
side of his acid-green Ranger
with a willow switch
on the dash and the dogeared
Bible in the glovebox, and I saw
his lips open, unopen like thin,
boring paper around a gift
you thought you'd never get:
the argyle socks buried
silently under pine leaves,
someone is late, and winter sun
is shut out with vertical blinds. He was driven
batshit crazy with kids and
welding asbestos, wedding his best toes
to rough boots: day in, day out.
At lunch, he read Outdoor Life to learn
intimately the glint of dogs' teeth on
duck wings, the depth of salmon eyes,
the melancholy of fawn spots. I
would like to fish
for words that rhyme with perch, shoot
pool or photos or for the moon, cast
a reel into the algaed water and pull out
the bass wriggling into a treble clef: Granny
said her paintbrushes were made with either
horsehair or squirrel hair.