My ambition to be done with ambition
suffered a setback at my father’s funeral
when I wanted to say something profound
that he would hear, that a tree could understand,
that the wind would feel, but the only words
I could come up with were a handful of dirt.
The sound of it hitting his coffin,
as if shouting at him, woke me up
and I took my clothes off and walked away,
back into my life as his child,
when all I wanted was to hold his hand.
I am now fathered but fatherless, a being
whose being can half be traced
to a hole in the ground,
where my father’s beard is,
and his bones. His beard will grow
for a while down there and his bones
will never cast a shadow, and I’ll always know
where to go to look at his name
cut in stone. Rain, with patience
and the greed of love
to hold, will slowly erase his name
and everything it touches, it always sounds
like a eulogy to me, the sky
trying to figure out what to say
about loss, and making a mess of it
like the rest of us.
Bob Hicok is the author of poetry collections including “Water Look Away,” “Red Rover Red Rover,” and “Hold.”
