Encountering the Dead

With my father it happened driving

From Santa Monica to Pasadena

A night of a full moon, the freeway wide

Open, the palm trees black. I was recalling

How for two years after that shy man's death

I thought only of death, how in April weather

I used to lock the Volkswagen windows so nothing

Pleasant or fragrant would reach me, how one time

I saw him staring in a ladies' room

Mirror, and stood in my tracks, paralyzed,

He looked so bitter, until his face dissolved

Back into my face. My radio was playing

The usual late-night jazz. I hated it

That we would never meet in mutual old

Age to drink a beer and declare our love.

While I was thinking that, the next things happened

All at once, like iron slugs

Being pulled into a magnet.

This has been mourning, I thought; then a sound came,

Like a door clicking closed, and I understood

Right off that I was finished, that I would

Not feel any more grief for him-

And at the same time, he was present; had been,

I now saw, all along, for these twelve years,

Waiting for me to finish my mourning.

At that I had to laugh, and he swiftly slipped

From outside the Buick, where he had been floating.

I was still doing about sixty.

He was just in me. His round eyesockets

Were inside mine, his shoulderblades aligned

With my own, his right foot and right palm

Lay with mine on the gas pedal and steering wheel.

The San Gabriel foothills were approaching

Like parents, saying here's a friend for life,

And then they blocked the moon, and I was back

On suburb streets.