I Wanted to Be
There
When My Father Died
I wanted to be there when my
father died
because I wanted to see him
die—
and not just to know him, down
to
the ground, the dirt of his
unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take
his loathing
back. All summer he had gagged,
as if trying
to cough his whole esophagus
out,
surely his pain and depression
had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no magical
genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is
all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hate him. Oh, I love
him,
my hands cherished him so, his
lying as if dead on the
flowered couch had pummeled me,
his silence had mauled me, I
was an Eve
he took and pressed back into
clay,
casual thumbs undoing the
cheekbone
eye-socket rib pelvis ankle of
the child
and now I watched him be undone
and
someone in me gloried in it,
someone lying where he’d lain
in chintz
Eden, some corpse girl,
corkscrewed like
one of his amber spit-ems,
smiled.
The priest was well called to
that room,
violet grosgrain of his ribbon
laid
down well on that bank of flesh
where the daughter of death was
made, it was well to say
into other hands than ours
we commend this spirit.
terrible
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