Poem-a-Day

^{“Near the end, though, only one thing matters
And nothing, not even the fox, moves as quietly.”
—David Bottoms}

I don’t know what word I wanted
to look up while writing at the kitchen table
a few weeks ago, but instinctively
I went to David’s study to use his
Old English Dictionary. He’d kept it
on his desk for decades, an oak desk
his father made him long before we met.
The way David told it his father descended
into the basement after long days working
at Huey’s Funeral Home where he embalmed
the newly-dead, held the hands of the bewildered
and offered peppermint and butterscotch candies
to children too young to know heaven’s unforgiving nature.
David couldn’t tell me the precise procedure
his father used to drain a body of blood
or how he pumped formaldehyde
and methane back into those vacant
veins, but he told me his father carried
a tender sorrow that must have made him bend
to the final task of placing eye-caps
over the dead’s sunken eyes and closing them
for eternity with patient and delicate sutures.
No doubt he brought that same patience
to the task of building David’s desk—
sawing, nailing, sanding—all measures
of mute love for his only child who loved words
but understood the wordless gesture
and hauled the desk with him
through the ashes of his first marriage
and every move after, even that last move
into the city, when the desk sagged
in the center, the planed boards warped,
and the grain had grown dark as old veins.
He refused to let it go, kept it centered
with the OED on one corner
even in this last room he still called
a study despite his vision flying apart
and the scattered sizzling of his brain
that had stolen so many of his words.
I stood at the door and flashed
on a day the week before
he died, when I asked him
what was he living for, really, what
was left for him?, a question borne
of bone-deep exhaustion and fear.
I expected him to point to me
or say our daughter’s name
but he said “poetry” instead.
Shame pinned me to the threshold
as I remembered how easily
I’d turned mean, how easily
I’d slashed his last small thread
and now his spirit refused me
entry, told me I had no right
to sit at his desk or touch
the one thing that contained
every word he would never write.