It's been a quietly difficult day for me. I've been writing for a good portion of it. Stuff I've been meaning to do for a while. Tonight, I'm going to relax. Watch an episode of Better Call Saul on Netflix with my daughter and her boyfriend.
I do have a poem to share. Something I wrote a while ago. I've been holding onto it, unsure if I wanted to share it.
Saint Marty offers it tonight in honor of his father.
To My Father's Ashes
by: Martin Achatz
Staring
at your dust
in
this black vase,
I
wonder what of you
I
possess. The cinder
that
was your hands. watered
tomato
plants every summer
until
they swelled into fists
of
starfish. Grains of your
crooked
spine that kept
you
from the missiles and grenades
of
Pork Chop Hill and Pusan.
Or
the pollen of your lips, tongue
that
sipped Seven and Seven
all
night until you didn’t remember
stoking
the furnace with so much
wood
that it roared, turned brick
red,
almost reduced the house to char.
It
could be the soot that was your testes,
scrotum,
vesicles, the place
where
the Y of me first swam
in
white brine the night
you
reached out, atlased
my
mother’s body with yours.
Perhaps
the ember of calf, shoulder.
Powder
of ulna, incisor, humerus.
Or
maybe it’s a part of you
I
don’t know. The finger
that
traced the arc of a neighbor
girl’s
breast under a haystack moon.
Your
grey eyes, the ones the cried
for
two days when your daughter
was
born with an extra chromosome
swimming
in the pools of her nuclei.
An
eardrum that heard Louis Armstrong
coax
“La Vie En Rose” from his trumpet
one
August night at the Paradise
on
Woodward when the Detroit River
was
a black tendon of water.
Or
a mole on your chest that your bride
kissed
over and over on your wedding
night
until it blossomed to the color
of
lupin.
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