SCREWS

I sat in a room in the Neptune Society

with the door closed, waiting.

I waited among the myriad brochures

about death and dying, and among the prints

of classical paintings of peaches and cherubs.

I sat in that room at a baroque table

among empty ornamental chairs 

for fifteen minutes. I wondered 

what was taking so long.

Where had the attendant disappeared to?

What dark passageways did she have to traverse

to find my father?

Since I had time on my hands I imagined

the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark,

and that vast warehouse where 

the Ark of the Covenant was secretly stowed away, 

hidden from posterity in a crate

among so many other nondescript crates.

I imagined my father’s ashes in such a place.

I imagined he was lost, like the Ark was,

but in a drawer somewhere and fastened to a page 

of a massive book that housed the remains 

of so many of the recently departed.

When the attendant returned with the urn, she said:

Sorry that took so long.

We had trouble with the screws.

They were longer than usual.

It took two of us to turn them.

Somehow, given who my father was,

long screws and all the turning it took

to put him in his final resting place
inside the urn, made perfect sense.