I Lost My Dad

“And the moment of death is also the death of

individual time: the life of a human being becomes

inaccessible to the feelings of those remaining alive,

dead for those around him…Time is a state: the flame

in which there lives the salamander of the human

                                    soul.”                               

Andrei Tarkovsky

               “Go and beat your crazy head against the sky.”

    John Sebastian

When I say I lost my dad

In December I mean

he is gone.  He

does not exist on the earthly

plane; he is ash.

I have lost him.

I looked in the bedclothes,

tangled like manacles.

I looked in the pages of books,

empty now with words

that clang and clamor.

Cracked alphabetiforms,

aberrant punctuation marks.

I looked throughout my house

when no one was home.

In rooms where the wind

soughs through the sheets,

through the shirts I left

hanging in the closet

so many years ago.

Dried out like bones.

And I came up barren and bereft.

He is gone.

Is he spirit?  Is there a God?

Is there transubstantiation?

Life after Death, an eternity?

I mean he is lost to me

now.    Forever, forever, forever.

He is a cruel and, Lord help

Me, lifeless, interrobang.