The Rest of the Way

Sometimes remembering the drawn‑out shameful way

My father took to die stops me on city streets.

Confused by all the liveliness,

I see the crowd I walk in brought up short

By different ways to cross in the same direction,

How many eyes we all meet walking.

That he rises up nearby,

Something not right in his body,

His head too big

For the shy speaking voice of his pain,

Must be a triumph for him,

That his soul is always here with us this way,

Filling the air until it's thick with summer,

In a circular passage bearing bits

Of all that's new in transit

Between this world and any other light.

Our comfort is that, to live on, he needs us

To stop short and imagine him, buck the crowd,

Regretting we never know what kind of child he had been:

The older one who wouldn't try what he could get away with,

Or the one who falls

Behind, crawling up steps,

Rubbing cement dust into his palms,

His knees chalked like clouds, his hair sweat‑furrowed.

This child of my dreams slaps his hands, and it goes

Dark again. Did he learn the seasons one by one?

He was a child I wanted to break.

I thought that once I got him

To look me straight in the eye,

I could gladly carry him the rest of the way.

The night under the bright moon in our backyard,

When the elm leaves strained against a breeze

On the last full night of July light

(Like the sighing tree

Aeneas saw underneath the world,

Walking down to his dead father's eyes)

Was only one more time he withheld direction.

But I had learned other weight,

From a hundred spots in that yard had looked

Through a screen window into his house

And it did me no good, taught nothing, the elms

The only trees I could name standing there with me.

Cells in the screen cut him to countless bits

Of memory merging in me, unable to leave him yet

As he left me, the dead man who now revisits

The living, but tenderly,

As the living must visit the dead, and lightly,

As elm leaves telling false dreams on a July breeze.

Tiny cups of honeysuckle scent dipped above,

So hard to find we were letting them find us,

Same as the unseen mosquitoes biting us

Like needles in the dark,

For we had waited through dusk for that gloorn,

For the drifting down of a fitful night.