MALPRACTICE 

They’re donors

not doctors,

but don’t know it.

Their too busy grafting

their own wounds

on to us too see

that their condolences

aren’t a healing flesh.

They’re just not.

Because we’re not

burn victims awaiting

some new tissue

like a salve. We’re not.

But no one

understands this,

least of all us.

Loss looks different

on different people.

And so, kindness

in our case,

feels more like malpractice

than a cure, ‘cause we can’t

feel flesh that isn’t 

there to feel.

MAKING MONEY

Alloys from the past.
Wounds from our father’s.

They come as hand-me-downs,
as currency

we as sons learn
to re-mint

into something new

and untarnished,

a money

of our own making,

that we carry, in time,

like bags of newly mined gold.

SOMBRERO

Memory dons a broad sombrero

strung with blinking, colored lights.

It holds up a jug of red wine

like a victor brandishing his trophy.

It flashes a cheeky grin.

A banquet is under way.

And those gathered in the heat of June

will toast to you, feast in your honor,

sing out your praises,

call you by your name.

You are the life of the party, Padre.

Photographs never lie.

HONOR

I am solid.
I hold my ground.
I gleam in the light.
I am a citadel of crystal.
I am a semi-precious stone.
This is what honor looks like
when I excavate it from within.
Like quartz.

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.

, NOW?

When my father returned home 

from the hospital and into hospice

his last words to me were:

Where’s my watch?

Strangely, he had time

on his mind.

Questions deepen when

we add now to the end of them.

They deepen and call forth

the present moment.

Today my father was cremated.

His body and his being 

are no longer

of this earth.

I wonder: Who am I 
without him, now?

THE MATTRESS

I was on the ground, on my knees,

deflating an earth-toned rubber mattress.

It was left behind when hospice came 

to collect their bed and after 

the Neptune Society had come to collect my father.

It was a cushion meant to keep him comfortable

and bed sores at bay as the end drew near.

As I kneaded the mattress with my knees, the air

escaped in deep exhalations, like the ones 

my father had made the night before

as my mother and I sat with him

in his last hours.

I had never been so close

to the act of breathing, 

to breath itself,

to the thin, fragile line

between breathing and not.

Never had I watched a breath

come and go so intently as I did

as I sat at my father’s side.

A shriveled shell that once buoyed a life,

provided creature comfort,

was all that remained

when the breathing finally stopped.

And with it also went, thankfully, 
my father's suffering.

Grief, I imagine, will fold over us,

my mother and I, in the coming days,

as we learn to breath in a world that no longer

includes my father and his breath.