God held my father’s face in His hands. This was it. “Earvin?” He said. “Earvin asked.”
The last days of Great Bent Arrow. Old, lost Charlie Hustle. Hair as white as cocaine.
Eternity lengthens by the infinite energy of imperfection. My father-in-law will work forever and be content with God.
Recent feats of strength: I am carrying, one by one, six railroad ties across my yard. I am hoisting them into the bed of a dump truck.
Sweet gum maples. Blossoms like muscadine grapes on the locust tree I planted in our backyard so she could see it from our kitchen.
Will they learn to clear tables? Be led expressionless by expressionless service dogs? Stare when a gift store visitor makes nervous conversation?
I’m not their brother. I’m not their son. I’m an absentee uncle. We’ll die never having said anything important to one another.
Nightly I aimed it to avoid the afterglow of God and received what I could in the static.
“Thank you, please, but no,” I say when offered the soup. Dead people can’t eat in dreams, so it seems best that I don’t either.
Nothing much left to peck. Pelt. A saw-toothed spinal column. It’s a primitive heap. It looks like the invention of the bagpipe.
The grackle is a walker. The robin too. Songbirds? Hoppers. Pheasants and partridge?
One imagines Dylan and the woman standing in the green light of a trailer.
Feast of Cocked Hats. Holy Smell of Train Yard. Bread of Abandonment. Bread of Troubled Gums.
Gray had once overtaken black, and then gray became white: the diffused color of a cataract, of milk making clouds in water.
I closed my eyes like blind Isaac and patted my goaty cheeks. “Esau? Is it you, Esau?”
Of the underwear band with the inside-out dashes. Of the stress-fracture walking boot and the mother outside the classroom.
I began the eulogy with a literal truth: she was the tallest cousin in the family. Ended it with an apocryphal one.
You and Jesus sit at a picnic bench, waiting for your name to be called: Gunther? James?
It’s late afternoon in eternity. Early spring. The cold and the sunshine make the blue membrane of the atmosphere look taut.
He’s as likely to be brained by errant goose as falling oak, but what’s the point?
He drives a truck that looks like a fighter jet and backs it in so it’s face-first. Always flexing.
It’s no relief to be done with physical beauty. Some men can let go. Certain others, you and I, never stop measuring.
“He’s taking what Mr. Trump is taking!” my mother-in-law told my wife. “Don’t even,” I said.
A bugler will play “Taps” but not “Hail to the Victors” because I lost the nerve to ask.
The Devil is no help to my marriage. He makes nicknames for the clothes my wife wears that he knows I don’t like.
This long in heaven my grandfather sees limits to perfection. When the weather turns, his scars itch.
Orange mercurochrome stains from skateboarding in culottes in those abandoned apartment complexes in Santa Clarita.
My sister would want you to know this about her: after I came along, her debt clock began clicking and remained dynamic all her life. She was owed.
“Sometimes you just have to get it out,” He’ll say, louder because of the wind and the passing traffic...
This is mostly how I remember the group and me in 1984: we talk about Jesus as brightly as we talk about Magnum P.I.
Neither married nor given in marriage. That’s rich, tell her, coming from the world’s most desirable bachelor.
Older still, I lit them off my zipper, as I’d read Jim Morrison did.
I’ve gone to church for 50 years and have liked it best only when it’s over.
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