Eulogy

This one, dear reader, is long & sad & about my Pops who died. Been thinking on him lately, so here it is. I think probably I'll keep adding onto this one for as long as I'm alive-- a letter I'll keep writing. I feel like it has a filament of life in it. Anyways. Buckle up. 

 

Eulogy

I remember thinking

Unsieved, maybe, a glottal

Clarity in my throat. Chest

Laden, a dizzied breath & 

Undone. My father

Leaning against the doorframe

A brief music for darkness

To clutch, winged, absented.

Where did you go? I am

Still moving, tree to tree, trading

One constellation for another. I want

A longer breath & so take one but am left

Unchanged. The day

Expands. Clumped soil, cutlass of river

Says bank & cuts & says bank again & all

The long while, bare & clear, river carries water

& water carries refracted light, fractured light,

Shard of disfigured sun. It sings your song

These many miles away. Carries its broken

Melodies to the Bering Sea. What music was it?

Angularity of bone. Rupture of skin. You were

A heaviest skeleton. I lifted you & felt your

Brokenness. Your skin weighed a world

Liver-marked, raw, creased. You were speaking

& then you weren’t & your sleeping lasted three

Days. You died in front of me & I made my brother

Make me believe it. He’s gone, he said. I think

He’s gone. What music

In that. I had wanted to unfurl a banner of grief

To wrestle wind & light & moon. To sing

Against that dark with lambent, fulsome grace

Conjure of iterations threads to hold & name

I wanted then some daffodils to bring

In hand to drop before the pace

Of sadness overwhelmed, wilding the tame

Quiet rhythm of our heart. But. I left

& left you ashes in some black box, thrust

In a closet in a white bag. We will curl

Our fingers blind & ball our fists & pull

You from its depth, some coming autumn. 

We will sing your name

& there, brief & weightless, you will merge

With a rising gale & be carried, borne

Aloft in slow drift to earth, enacting the arc

Again. You will feather. Leaf-fall. Wander.

Then your dirt will burrow below black soil

Where as a boy you planted strawberries, cursing

Your father, whose whiskey-honied voice 

Spilled out the window

& over the meadow into the old acreage

Where foundation stones described

The circumference of some forgotten dreaming

& tin cans rusted in a burnt heap given

To time & flame & sky & no one who wanted it anymore. 

& we boys will call it a home again I

Guess. Remember us? Festooned in sleeping bags

Of blue flannel under the hearth? Remember the dust

On the hard candy disdained in crystal? The ghost

Howling past the black oaks? The barbed wire

Where my slick red pocket knife folded on my thumb

& I hoisted it gauzed & vermillion against the

Great glow of the September leaves? I held

A branch from the peach tree & closed my eyes

& felt its tensile, animal surge over the old well. My

Brother & I saw a flash in the southern sky

& didn’t speak a word. We threw a rock through

Every window of every antique car gathered

In rusting heaps, wheel-less & suddenly useless

In hummocks of bronzing grass & desiccated 

Soil. What is there

In remembrance but a desperate gathering of need? 

It is our blood, in its circuitries. & then

Arrested, given to flame. Where can I find

Myself in you, now? I have lost you & I

Have lost, too, a self appareled 

In what clothes you chose, in what hope

You sewed into my seams, what affections,

Confidences, griefs. How we all shadow

& flicker & burn off in the flight 

Of your reminiscences. Lost to ourselves

& from you & tenebrous in what dirt

Remains underfoot, querulous & done

Reading maps even as we find ourselves

Marooned in clouds of birdsong & breeze

& syllabaries of the unfamiliar. I have 

Lived knowing what I seek out lives

Somewhere in the world

Until now. 

The world’s core a charged filament

Then, sky skeined in firmament, a vestiture

& every story melodied in canticle,

The world a numinous book, your living

Its shaking grey line, script from birth.

To witness, to bear, to fall into disrepair

In imitations wild & wandering. What you

Taught of love, & how here in the sear pallor

Of pending winter I peer between flushing

Incarnadine willow, blueberry leaves purpling

& the spent white furze of fireweed, all

Clarified in late autumnal light. I try

To yoke myself to you, your ghost, raven

In captive flight, whiskey jack cackling 

On torqued resplendent boughs of spruce

But you are not here & neither is anyone

& names spill from my mouth in pebble & bone

& soon will come the snow to sort them out. 

Where in this wide world am I? Are you? 

You skulk in peripheries, half-stern but smiling

Maybe with mischief, my bike in collision

With the tennis net, my body in collision with 

The clear water in falling, my dreaming 

Through your refractions. I was there,

Thrumming with love. I heard every tale

& told my own & now, still, I see falcons

& think of metaphors. What could be done?

In the end your fingers curled back like talons

& your muscle absented itself from your bone

& you were swathed in endless need but

Bright of eye, not longing exactly but resting

In the comfort of affections long gone. As if

Recollection could construct the bridge

You needed to cross unto your death. Tell

The story of your own dying, & act it out

To leave a room of people staring at your

Face, its angle askew, your mouth jarred

Open, your chest impossibly still in the robe

That rose & fell & rose & fell while the blue light

Of the respirator blinked & stuttered & stopped

& we all held our breath & then forgot to start

Breathing again

 

We heard slow music

Snow fell & then melted

In greying exhaust of passing

School buses. Rivulets

Choked with leaves of sullen

Dun & russet, tall sedge

Grass slumped & folded

Over itself. There were 

Deer tracks along the bank

Of the creek & its water

Burgeoned with silt &

Run & flowed brown

Through that sliver of forest

& ended in the dull silver

Of culvert slipping beneath

A suburban lawn where

Families watched television

Or talked about their days

Or prepared dinner, where 

They learned guitar & played

Board games, painted with

Their fingers on textured paper

& called old friends on land-

Lines, reorganized their bookshelves,

Made mix tapes for girlfriends,

Sorted laundry or shot

Hoops or embraced in sudden

Fits of lust or vacuumed

Foyers, wrote their grand-

Mothers or bent over aging

Puzzles or sat doing very

Little at all but watching

Their father slowly die

I keep thinking it’s about breath but there isn’t any more breath. 

The air expunged was air alone again

But carried notes of your impeccable teeth

& the Oreos you craved with grapefruit soda

& ate with quiet deliberation & no apparent joy

& where you lay the bed was dismantled

& all of the tubes to the breathing machines

Wound up & the oxygen tanks capped & the clicking

Infernal metronome of the bipap went quiet

& in the room hung just air & space. 

I went to work, sorting out your socks,

Dispensing with your toiletries. Looking

At your morphine & wondering if it would help

But then I couldn’t stand the thought of putting

Another goddamn drop in anyone’s mouth ever again. 

Loss hollows unto numbness, scrapes on bone

Sears when specter would turn shadow

& spill across the emptiness of a room. 

& now lost all months subsequent

To season & sparrow, the garden teeming green

Under contrailed sky shot through with the buzz

& whir of mosquitoes. I looked for you

In raven’s slaloming flight. In black dirt

Or under root. In openness where mountains pale

Off into muted sunset. & then in fall

Under greying birch, gust gathered up

& roiling, silvered arc of cloud

& tinny star. The moon wan when I wanted

Its old incandescence, the lights tired.

Snow fell, then collapsed from cloud

& we are buried now our own way

& dreaming again of light. There is 

In winter such erasure, such surety of what

Is gone, such unanimous lament

That the quiet passing of a day

Converging with the soft, closed curtain of night

Seems threnody under birdsong & grey glare. 

But it’s mourning everything anymore 

Which maybe means you’re part now

Of everything & so I will miss the world

Entire the more for that when it recedes. 

Here our children grow & I grow

Tired tending them often. You loved

Them so. A flame of life. I saw

Your eyes see them & then remember

That you were dying & then see them

Again, a different way, as if your gaze

Could hold them close & tell them

Everything in a language they might know. 

I tell them, but they are too young. 

It upends me to think your absence through

Their recollection. Time carves & scrapes

& tunnels & what ever were we

But flicker & phantom & love

O unending love

The way the rain will stop but start again

& it will always be the rain. I know

Our smallness in the world

But know it too occupied by all

Of our exigent dreams. Matter insubstantial

Mattering yet because it wills

A step & another & then we live

That way, mattering to ourselves

In a world that we say is made of matter. 

But then I wonder if what is true

Can only be felt & if the moment we know

Something to be true, it is introduced

To whatever degradations of circumstance

Awaited it all the while. The clutching after

Compels, not the convergence with the thing. 

& once touched, the thing alters, has been

In relation, changes its name. I don’t know. 

I miss you. I feel too much the father

Without a father of my own anymore. 

Spring flints off the cold angles of ice

Like shook fire. The sunlight scars into snow

& our thin skin. A year in the world that no longer

Carries you in it. Your mineral self hoisted

Into memory alone. Your last conscious days

I hoisted you bodily from your hospital bed,

Your white robe with cornflower pattern

& you weighed an impossible amount. 

I thought I would break you from holding

You so close. You wheeled out to the kitchen,

Laughed at a joke or two, cried looking at me, 

A child, really, before dying, & a father

& a man tethered to the waking world

Not by fear but by love alone. A half hour

Later you were back in the bed, dying again. 

Your coma lasted three days. Your lower lip

Curved at the end, your neck listing to the right. 

The room was echo & your oxygen pushed in & out. 

Every time I looked up from the page of my book

I expected your eyes to open until you died

& then I knew they would never. At the funeral

Home where you were cremated my brother & I 

Were let into a bronze curtained room to identify you. 

In a coffin a while, made to look spritely alive 

Before committed to the flame. As if we hadn’t watched

You die that morning. As if to fool us away

From our sadness. It was worse I think than the rest.

You would have hated it, probably did, peering

Through the window with bird eyes or wherever 

you went. Your body bore but little resemblance

to you, dad. I knew you gone long before. 

I know you gone still.