The house holds no more words.
Every one from a to zygote,
even the World Book Encyclopedias
(a graduation gift circa '62),
long since carted to Carolina
for my parents' grand retirement
that will not come to pass.
On the porch my father lies flushed
and dreaming back to boyhood
or war, when soldiers crushed heroin
with their hands and smoked it.
He refused, but now wears a patch
more potent than opium behind one ear.
Beyond the porch screens, bug-picked
and spider-laced, the hills of Virginia
march into a future we can't see,
just as birdsong insists on daylight
long after it's gone. The lilies father planted
to flower the season of my wedding
open their awful mouths—
the first just yesterday and by today
two turned trumpet. There is no silencing
their dreadful fanfare. Why must they persist
when each pink tongue only says the same thing?
The more that open, the sooner he'll be gone.
©
is the author of The Old Dominion, winner of the 2012 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.
