In What Direction or When

By the time I find he has gone, it is

too late to know in what direction he went

or when. My father's ghost has left

the earth. Ten years after his death,

on his birthday, when I turned to address him,

there was no one there, and the space, where no one

was, seemed to have been dwelt in by no one

for a time. And I had nothing to say to it,

the naked shrine where the image had stood.

Gradually, I could see, with one side

of my head, my father, without clothes,

the size of my thumb, some months ago,

kneeling and crawling, head-first,

into a cold, open lily in the

woods on an overcast day, as if going

back where he had come from, into the moist,

chilly, washed throat of a flower

which drinks dirt through its pipes-the place

where babies come from, he has gone to earth.

I know this is just my figure of him, someone

else may still have a sense of him here,

but I seem to have laid the ghost of my father,

laid him into a calla lily,

his nixie shoulders caressed by anthers-

down the tubes of the xylem with him!

Whatever it was I had wanted from him

I know I could never have had, let him sink with some

chemical honor back down into the water table.