Read by the author.
I think of him in his thinning white undershirt,
crisp white button-down, bluejeans,
and the red wool jacket that was a gift from my brother
who took my hand and placed it in my father’s hand
before my father’s hand was no longer my father’s hand,
a hurried gesture, spontaneous, and full of my brother’s kindness.
My brother was on watch. “Hurry,” he’d said,
until he was surrounded by sisters.
We were all silent.
I don’t know if my father forgave the years
I did not love him. Decades, even,
when I did not know I loved him.
Feels as if sorrow, like the highest shelves
at the dollar store I sometimes wander,
replenishes itself.
A month later, it was somehow April
in Washington State and a law was passed
that would have allowed us to place our father
in a vessel and surround him with wood chips
and straw, fungi and protozoa,
then let the compost age in an open-top
fifty-five-gallon drum until,
all seven brass-colored snaps
and two replaced hips sieved out,
he could have become soil for my mother’s garden,
where the hyacinths, silent purveyors of sorrow
and forgiveness, might go forth and multiply.
This is drawn from “Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space.”
