The height of healing

About a year ago I tried to use the last letter my father sent me as the basis for a series of erasure poems. I think I got three or four done, then I sort of lost interest. The planned last poem was a blank page. Eye-roll. There were moments that I got peeved and there is one Thanksgiving memory where I honestly had hurt feelings as my sisters and brother and their families were all together, at our parent’s. But, as long-range estrangements go, or went, have gone, this is well, history; the father poems are boring. And isn’t that the height of healing to move into a room of general indifference?

This morning the wren woke the neighborhood with her big ass song. It was a song of cool air and a breeze and a drop in humidity. She sang of Otto and Olive the groundhogs that live under the deck (and the neighbor’s shed and the tremendous wood pile just made for groundhogs and snakes), she sang of their incredible appetite for clover flowers and high-speed shuffles over the lawn.  She sang to mock the Blue jays and the cardinals, knowing that her cinnamon brown blends with so much more than reds and blues and morning colors should ease one into the day, something soft and brown. That a song should be as big as the sky and heavy as the rain clouds that circled and sputtered. She sang of the wind that blew overnight and the thunder that cascaded through the trees before dawn and the air that arrived like a gift. Her song was gift. She knew her song was gift, so she made it louder, she shifted from tree branch to eave and then to the little bamboo frame on the geranium right by the bedroom window. Her gift of an earsplitting song that made me laugh out loud. What can you do? Father’s Day has come and gone, my father is gone, any spare song is a gift.

And here’s (what may be) the final poem about my father:

A hum that passes

Two years dead my father returns to apologize
but because I forgot the open door, I was in another
part of my home and missed his shadow.

Even in the last days of his life, those I spent
helping to pack up a house that I had finally
stayed thirty plus years after he said I was dead
to him, he said little and I did not ask as he spent
his days barely breathing, barely there.

So now, his presence in that empty space
became just another hum that passes
and makes me stop, thinking I’d heard something.
I shake my head; I was dead for so long
why did he think resurrection was possible?