The Funeral
When you need them most, to ask where to go from here, your hair growing brittle as February grass, they’re gone, singly or united, under stone in a safe place where the stranger who cares for them, pulling a mower behind his International Harvester to trim the grass they lie beneath, setting poison out for the mice and squirrels and weeds that mate nearby, knows them better than you, seasons laboring by like old city buses against the wind, but too far away to disturb a parent’s rest, their reward for teaching you that being their child’s the same as being no one else, that mourning them’s the final thing you have to learn.
Interruption
Hundreds of highway miles away, as far from dreaming as midday is from star, in the middle of things in no way related to him, I suddenly think of my father’s wrinkled hands, each vein throbbing and hard. I’m a small boy not much taller than his table. He stops, turns and stoops to show me what he’s making. Then he’s gone. O when will this loving end?
