I Lost my Dad

by Corey Mesler

"And the moment of death is also the death of individual time: the
life of a human being becomes inaccessible to the feelings of those remaining alive, dead for those around him.  Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul."

-------  Andrei Tarkovsky

"Go and beat your crazy head against the sky."

When I say I lost my dad

in December I mean

he is gone. He

does not exist on the earthly

plane; he is ash.

I have lost him.

I looked in the bedclothes,

tangled like manacles.

I looked in the pages of books,

empty now with words

that clang and clamor.

Cracked alphabetiforms,

aberrant punctuation marks.

I looked throughout my house

when no one was home.

In the rooms where the wind

soughs through the sheets,

through the shirts I left

hanging in the closet

so many years ago.

Dried out like bones.

And I came up barren and bereft.

He is gone.

Is he spirit? Is there a God?

Is there transubstantiation?

Life after death, an eternity?

I mean he is lost, lost to me

now. Forever, forever, forever.

He is a cruel and, Lord help

me, lifeless midnight.