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We remitted my father this year to the nameless earth,

where no gods churn the ground with their invisible hands

and no resurrected form yet retains his strange acuity. We eulogized him

then went about our business, dazed for a time, then made a vow

to spread his ashes where he and his wife had left


their disparate passions. The business of the living is to return




the memories of the dead to a verbal corpus and to return

their myths to a physical place on the earth

and perhaps find some measure of comfort in what is left


after their ashes are wind-borne. My hands

tremble at this thought, the emptied vessel, the vow

to ascribe meaning to a meaningless death, to forget in him




a terrible iniquity and thus a childhood lost: yet also to find in him

such boundless joy among the aspen and evergreen, the return

to the garden, before the temptation and Adam’s vow,

before he rose up from God’s cruel breath and the earth,

before his own trembling hands

had limned the contours of his nakedness, and hers. All that is left


is this jar of desiccated dreams, all that is left

of my father is a thimbleful of questions. I still see him

when I dream, driving an empty bus, his hands

curled around the door handle like Charon on his return

from the River Styx, ferrying me and my daughter from the earth

across the threshold. Sometimes he vows


we will be safe on our journey; in other dreams, he vows

nothing, but is consigned to the end, rolling onto his left

side in silence like St. Lawrence on hot coals, the earth

finally collapsing in around him.

He was a martyr even among the living, and in return

we grieved at his every step downward, our hands


bound by his prophecy, knowing his hands

were summarily free to fashion his end. Yet I vow

that this is not his end, and that in these words he will return

if only for a moment from the edge of that darkling plain, where he left

Blake and Arnold to confer with him

under the shadow of the Earth.
 

This is my wish, to return his voice to the living; to feel his hands

once more upon my shoulder as I walk the earth, and to vow

this is not all that is left of him.


Jazno Francoeur is our Poet in Residence for November.

Previously: ”Via Sacra“, and "Fireweed".