The night before the funeral
I carve his face out of the dark
with an outstretched finger
scraping through the wreckage of dusk
on the window-glass and over
the hunched frame of a storm
ruined hay-barn.
It’s 2012, the year the world ends.
The grackles widen over hornbeam
like notes on sheet music
at the far edge of the land. Once,
my mother took me
away from my father
below the quarter-truce
of the moon. She drove
a ‘76 AMC Gremlin,
ready to be junked and forgotten
by the time I was born.
There is no need
to go back. To watch the sun rise
in the side-view mirror
as if the bright-painted steel
of a Ferris Wheel in a traveling fair.
There’s a night that sleeps
and a sky for darkness, and for burial,
for ash, and flight.