Anniversary of Your Father's Death

Anniversary of Your Father’s Death

You pluck the hair from your left nipple
in the bathroom—I watch you from bed
running your finger over the flesh
where the follicle was uprooted.
This has not been a good day, and here
this single hair with its pinprick removal
is just one more thing. 

My parents' house is next to a cemetery,
and when I live with them I remember how each week
it seemed there was a new stone being birthed from the
                  earth,
and how for months people were drawn there,
as though the markers were great anchors 
that weighed the whole town, as sandbags hold a hot-air
                balloon
to the ground, so it seemed that had the dead 
not been planted there the buildings and streets
would slowly rise and disappear. 

This morning I was lying awake
listening to your breath against the gentle hum of the
             refrigerator 
in the next room when you shuddered awake. You
had dreamed you were flying, Home,

you had said. But your body was a great weight,
so you were continually pulled again
and again to strange streets, the tops of houses,
unfamiliar woods—whatever you happened to be flying over
at the time, the earth nothing more than a midwife
whose face lingers as a searing whiteness
long after you have been dragged from the dark.
 

Waking, you worked your fingers into my shirt,
twisting it into knots, and spoke matter of factly about
             your father,
how he turns the earth now, quietly and cleanly,
finally free of the dirt baked into his hands after
years of turning the earth with his fists.
 

Easing each other back into sleep, I dreamed
of a small town rising from your body: a house,
a little church, stores and streets lined with dogwoods.
And up on a hill, a little graveyard where your father is buried,
and pushing up through his earth a single weed 
that will not let you forget. 

Vol. 25, no. 2, 1997