Note book: About Dad Dying

“About Dad Dying #1”

My father has died and I feel
like a vast chamber filled with coiled highway.
Not coiled like a spring, but
like a rope on a pier- with no kinetic ache
whatsoever. No

I changed my mind. I don’t feel like a chamber.
I don’t feel like any damn thing at all.

I try to get my head around “losing a parent.” So I imagine him lost.
A kid in a grocery store crying alone in the produce.
A dog off the leash.
Keys in the couch.
The Game. A Chance.
The Will to Whatever.

But this is very silly. I know he is not lost. He is simply gone.

It’s raining out and all I can do is smoke
and stare at the traffic. And let a steady succession of cups
of coffee grow cold and undrinkable
at my wrist.

Normally I would make fun of myself for these clichés,
But good goddamn, if not now, then when?

“About Dad Dying #2”

So
I’ve, obviously, been considering
both death, and Death.

I’ve always talked a lot about the
importance of art and literature.
Saying: “All of life’s lessons
have already been learned by others.”

I return again and again to
Mary Oliver and
her old lady naturalism of cut hay
and empty beetle shells-
bits of things
caught in a breeze.
And disappearing out of sight.

This is pleasing and easy.

However, I’ve realized these last weeks
that I’ve read a great deal about death, but that
when people write about death- they write almost
exclusively to make themselves feel better about
their own mortality- not to tell me
anything at all about my dad.

When Auden says “stop the clocks”
(for Yeats I think), he really meant:
“Stop them for me when I go.”

I know nothing about how to deal
with this loss and my guides have failed me.
I can’t recall a story that is applicable
any more than I can be sure I recall
exactly how dad’s laugh sounded.

So
I was watching the news
and I thought:
What a silly scaffolding
I have constructed
around myself.

How a soldier might
shake his head, or
even laugh, if he could
see the total of what
I understand about death.

“About Dad Dying #3”

We went out to the farm
to see if any of the old
equipment was still there
or worth selling. And in the
twelve years since I
left home, everything
got rusty, and weeds and
brambles grew into
joints, and even trees,
as big as fence posts, had
risen around the hunched
machinery.

Did you know trees could
grow that thick, quietly
while you are away?

“About Dad Dying #4”

I wake up these mornings
and find those things
between he and I have
changed shape and
reordered themselves. I
remain lost as I was-
but now in new unfamiliar
mazes.

People keep asking how
I am doing. But surely
they do not actually want to
know the answer to that
question. What could they
mean? Here: I feel
I am very confused.
And I am so sad that
a notion of old depressions

born of internal events
seems the apex of foolishness.
My heart is the very
definition of mourning-
split and full of the winter.
My meals taste of sand
and sit in my throat.

My love for my father
and my anger at him,
those long enduring
long entwined
long reaching twin arms,
are soft at my side,
hands open and close
with their former object
lost.

“About Dad Dying #5”

I can see some little bird
(I do not know bird names)
rising off the asphalt
and firing into traffic.

I can imagine that tiny thing
very close to my face-
smelling like an attic-
like hot dust. Its warm

body. Its tiny chest holding
a tiny clock. Its tiny mouth
loaded with a clock’s word. Or,
trapping what a clock eats.

“About Dad Dying #6”

When one is held against the
the other, the benefit of having

spent up life across so many
places becomes apparent.

While hours certainly
blend, whir, and settle in my
mind. Days and years do not-

I almost never forget, where

I was. And now this great
line laid down- all before,
all after.

“About Dad Dying #7”

I almost forget for little
spaces of time the length
of a daydream, but it
can be anything that
brings the fact of the thing
back to me.

And when it comes,
it comes hard and with
speed from a great height.

It collars me like a thrown
weapon- and all joy drains
from the street and
the houses and the faces
of the people rushing by
in cars and on the trolley.

And here I am, weeping
on the neutral ground
in the middle of my
evening run.

“About Dad Dying #8”

The titles of these
writings are swallowed
the world outside their
scope: now that my
father has died,

everything is about
his dying. The walls
of these poems
may form a closed
cell,

but the in and the out
are indistinguishable.

"About Dad Dying #9"

And this is exactly what I mean:

I’ve been dark the last couple days-
real dark. But it was broken

by this band: Vampire Weekend.

This sunny perfect little record-
As much of a marvel as can be thrown
by white kids.

Will it always make me think of dad?

This is what I mean: nothing
escapes. Everything after
is After.

“About Dad Dying #10”

I had expected dad to die
suddenly for more than a decade:

but, do not look at that
thought directly, or it will

twist and
become the whole empty world.

(This exercise has become self-aware:
and thus, academic at best and toxic at worst.

So then,
abandon it: let it be orphaned.)