Rehearsing the Death of My Father

by Derek Ellis

 

In the garden there is snow where there once was
snow & the sun fades into the trees.

Faded light inches across leftover lawn
chairs from a summer barbeque—

what do you do when weather holds
& life persists—when you turn & find

only the thick fog from the river filling
the field? What now can be kept secret—.

I keep quiet and do not move. Somewhere
between garden & field,

in the middle distance, my father hauls
a deer carcass behind him.

His lumbering shape becoming almost
formless, almost lost, as I bend

over this desk. Alone in the snow that was
always snow, in the sleeping garden—

My father fails to meet me.

 



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