"The work to hold you"

Cobblestones rattle beneath your feet like loose teeth. You stand helplessly,

waiting for me, waiting to drive me to school. The best dreams are when I remember

you are dead but I can work to hold you in the long corridor of my sleep,

can cable the pines lining Gallivan Boulevard to my most upright of memories and make time still

as a corpse. Jesus, don’t stand in the middle of the street, Dad. Cars are coming. Dad, don’t be a fool

as I am now, waking upright, moaning, lilting embryonic in the sea of your absence. Two years,

I tell my therapist. Now your body’s in a ten-inch box, a thimble cove you crawled into to languish years

free of Mom’s incessant shuffling. She was driven to pile and repile magazines, to—helplessly?—

motor her mouth and motor on: “Work sucks. Who does my boss think he’s fooling?

The neighbors are snooping, and the goddam laundry pile’s blocking out the sun.” Remember,

Daddy, when we cooked her Christmas ham for Chanukah dinner? You told us to hush up and hold still

as she clopped in to find the spread. But even now I hear the siss-si-siss of your giggling when asleep

or trying, trying, trying to be. I tell my therapist I’ve lost my compass. I can’t find sleep.

I tell her, I wish I’d seen you dead so I could have some idea of where you went. Of where fifty-five years

could possibly retreat. Ashes in a ten-inch box, a thimble cove, really? Maybe I could erect a still

slab of stone somewhere you loved. Somewhere I love you. My therapist talks at me helplessly

but I hear you instead, saying, “Fuck it, slap the stone down on this couch.” I remember,

though I wasn't there, what Mom did in those precious April Fools’

moments before she could pick up the phone to call me. Foolishly,

this was the first time she’d ever stopped just to sit, just to watch you sleep,

just to set down at the kitchen table and remember.

But she sat. And she remembered

without thin cigarette or Chardonnay for the first time in years,

without lipstick or powder or a friend’s voice long-distance. Just her own body, helplessly,

unbearably still.

In those under-appraised moments, there was no decorum left but a suitcase of gold jewelry

she’d accumulated from you. It grew heavy then. Dad, that gold pulled her down like sleep,

deep and deeper down into the old years, the brittlest years, the glass years

of your courtship she’d long stowed away. A Hummel figurine to hold the light. I remember,

back then, her fingernails were a sunset on mars. I tell my therapist, I remember

helplessly. Helplessly, I remember that April Fool’s morning

you dozed away. And just a day

later you were dead. I tell my therapist, It’s helplessly unfunny—like waking

from sleep thinking I’ve drowned with my hand in a cup of water, pissing myself silly.