ways my father did not die
it was not as it was in dreams:
not hypothermia, not from the cold
water seeping into the cloth that
bound his feet – he did not walk
miles and miles to the hospital
through icy pools sprawling malignant,
to die with the dark winter light
on the inside of his eyes –
brighter than that medicinal fluorescence,
than the room where we unwrap the
layers, strip his body like a sodden onion
but find him not there –
he did not die as in the second dream:
on the side of a mountain road,
gravel digging into my knees
with each spasm of his back –
his arching body contorted
like a trout diseased and whirling,
bent nearly to snapping, trying
to shift shape out of this –
to a fish to a bird to anything
that could relieve him of his
aching form, leaving me with the
pulse of absence in my arms.
i was not there. i can only believe
what they told me, that it
was swift, that he shifted away
in a last exhale that still hung
mist-like over half-lidded eyes
when we came in the early morning.
i will never know what he was
thinking. if he knew it was coming,
that silent white meteor
searing through the window, stealing
his gaze, leaving his quiet head
slumping towards the door.
i do not dream of how it
happened really: not of the day before
when i brought him blankets
and the paper, warmed his feet
and kissed his whiskers,
brought the smallest bites of
his last dinner to his lips. and
i will wake and wake again
with the ache of these remainders,
of these ways it never happened,
of the dreams that are not only
though they cannot change the dead.
