ways my father did not die

field grass remnants, riverlot, early november 2011

* * *

(poem re: two nightmares, and the fact that when he dies in them, i can't wake up and tell myself that it was just a dream.)

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.