He died at different times in different places.
In Wales he died tomorrow,
which doesn’t mean his death was preventable.
It had been coming for years,
crossing the ocean, the desert, pausing often,
moving like water or wind,
here turned aside by a stone,
then hurried where the way was clear.
Once I lay on my back in the grass and watched
as cloud after cloud moved east
and disintegrated. The mystery now
is not where they went, but how
I could ever have been so idle.
Funerals are all the same.
I saw him cry at his mother’s wake
when I was young enough to be
picked up, lofted into someone’s arms.
He, a man, cried that day,
but people smiled, too. You think now
you want to be remembered,
but the dead don’t care.
My grandmother’s face said that.
Indifference is a great relief, after a lifetime
of mothering one’s many worries,
trying not to play favorites.
I wasn’t present when he died.
I feel that keenly, that I should have
had a share. I was spared
unfairly. I was not fed
the bitter broth and the hard bread.
exactly? What was I doing at that exact moment?
What can I do now?
But the moment is never exact.
One dies over years — yes, there is a first breath
and a last, yet consider a cut tulip
upright in a vase, closing as the day ends,
then turning toward the morning window, opening again.
One day I touch a petal and it falls off.
Even so the balding stem takes
another sip of water.
My mother held the phone to his ear
so each middle-aged child could say a distant good-bye,
and she searched his face for a sign.
Perhaps. No one knows what he heard
or if a phone was essential to it.
The longing to believe is more enduring
than any truth — truth is so perishable.
I once was found, but now I’m lost.
I could see, but now I’m blind.