When I came to say goodbye,I brought a pocketful of poems,not mine, but some which I meant to comfort you,and I hope they did,hope you heard me through your sleep,but now I know they were more about menot sayingwhat I might have said. InsteadI read you classic meditations on the dead.After I rubbed my snipped fingertipthrough your thinning hairand down your cheek drapedin clear rubber snakes, breathingyour last life into you,I might have told youall of the weird reasons for which I love you:for the Yahtzee dice we’d roll far beyondbedtime, their clink and rattle across the tablepaused for my brief performances,and how I love you for how you’d laugh, your belly roilingas the boy of me would be The Goat or beltLunchlady Land, channeling Adam Sandlerinto your living room. How I love youfor the way I fed a goat by handwhy you stared at me with all of the loveyou were storing for the baby you’d strugglefor so many years to have, and when you finally didand we three heard the screechingfrom beneath your black AstroVan and Icrawled under to remove the bloody henwho’d roosted in cool shade on some pipe beforehaving its wings twistedin the serpentine belt that propelled usto the park or beach whereyou would sit for hours revelingin the pleasure of watchingchildren playing; I love youfor that, and for how you would hydrateon the dark syrup of Coca-Cola, indulging meto what was off-limits at home, the bubblespopping like a billion tiny balloonsin my mouth, each onedeclaring my love for you;popping like all the kernelswe exploded like starsupon your stovetop whilewe traveled to Ozand you held mewhen the monkeys flew.But rather than tell you these thingsI read you Wordsworth,hoping to assuage the humanfears, which you, so many times earlier,had contended your strong faith preventedyou from having, never wishingfor a more magnificent couch, wrapped inits drapery and lying down to pleasant dreams,which I hope I didn’t interrupt by reading youDickinson and Donne, which when I wasdone with, having concluded,Death, thou shalt die, yousat up and coughed and I thoughtI killed youfor a moment. Just a couple dayslater your soul flew from your skin, your skinthat had been scarred from hard living,ingrown nails plucked long ago from your big toes,blemished chest from having your breastsburned inside a conflagration of cotton nightie,and as your wick suffocated in its transfixed waxI recall you telling me lovinglyto never lean over a candle.
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