Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth

FINAL POEM FOR MY FATHER MISNAMED IN MY MOUTH

Sunlight still holds you and gives

your shapelessness to every room.

By noon, the kitchen catches your hands,

misshapen sunrays. The windows

have your eyes. Taken from me,

your body. I reorder my life with

absence. You are everywhere now

where once I could not find you

even in your own body. Death means

everything has become

possible. I’ve been told I have

your ways, your laughter haunts my mother

from my throat. Everything

is possible. Fatherlight

washes over the kitchen floor.

I try to hold a bit of kindness

for the dead and make of memory

a sponge to wash your corpse.

Your name is not addict or sir.

This is not a dream: you died

and were buried three times. Once,

after my birth. Again, against

your hellos shedding into closing doors,

your face a mask I placed over my face.

The final time, you beneath my feet. Was I

buried with you then? I will not call

what you had left anything

other than gone and sweet perhaps. I am

not your junior, but I fell in love

with being your son. Now what? Possibility

was a bird I once knew. It had one wing.

Final Poem for the “Field of Poetry”

FINAL POEM FOR THE “FIELD OF POETRY”

In the grip of a nor’easter,

you come bearing grief,

have in pieces not come

in peace. You arrive bladed

with certainty. You slam shut

the car door and smolder

before the locked cabin, rough

trip up the Hudson as you distracted

yourself with a list of flowers awaiting

deft penmanship to groom them

tight and blow them clean.

News of your brother’s death

intercepted your drive to this

residency, fellowship

among the crude Madonnas

of empty mailboxes draped in robes

of days-old ice. You have not written

about the passing of family

before, their antagonistic absences.

Intrusive their teething

tombstones in the brain. Pill

after pill to sleep, to create,

to erase, you swallow and scratch

into a notepad what the frozen earth

refuses: bougainvillea, lilac, burning

bush. Another close kin added

to the Bible’s kept obituaries.

You hated your brother’s left

eye, unruly wanderer settling

away from you and observing

a world you could not sense. Glossy ivy

in all its tenure, the tender fingers

of buckeye. The white page

frozen before you like rime. You

dig and discover what you already knew:

decaying kin, meandering roots

catching his beautiful ankles. You

were looking for a way out through

beauty but beauty only goes

where needed. On the pad you write: enough—

what you’ve had, how much

more of you there is, how

much of you will be left when you’re gone.

The Asphodel