Deliverance

Remembering my father

1.

The night your own
difficult breath awakened you, your lungs
spent from trying, and you sensed your heart,
that grieving well, slowing almost imperceptibly,
and your legs and arms refused command or
even suggestion to rise or sway
or go into the spasms you’d become
accustomed to, and your eyes opened only
slightly and your vision went grainy                                                                                                                                                                         like the silent films you remembered in some
distant part
of your collection of impressions, and the pain,
your pain which had become such a familiar presence,
first a nemesis that kept you riveted on the joints,
the muscle fibers, the mechanics of inhalation and
bladder control, then a graduate course that taught you
the location of your liver, your spleen, taught you the
intimate ways of the dying body, the ways of dying
with cancers; one, two, three kinds of cancers and kept
you faithful to your medicines;
two every four hours of the blue
one pink in the morning, the small white which accompanied every meal
when you could eat, the large ones, difficult to
swallow, that you could never remember
the why for…

2.

Did the pain lift and the light blur as you finally
let go the idea you’d ever, in that sad old body, heal?
As the resistance dropped, did you see them all at once,
the welcoming angelic beings as they opened
their ethereal arms to claim you? Did they come
together, in a circle, or did they grace you one
by one, enfolding your brittle bones as they reached
inside to help you glide out? Did you,
I ask, feel that peace as golden light flood
your dimmed perceptions, did you
groan before you let that last, stale breath escape
your windpipe, did it feel, as you left
like sweetest relief from a too-tight shoe?

3.

On your deathday, as we grieved, did you scan
the paths your travels had worn, did you revisit some
moments longer than others, did you regret?
Did you send comfort in each
sympathetic call, touch, hug, did you
make sure the children still laughed and
did you lift us up and sweep
away any traces of old
anger, unfinished business, that we might
remember you pure and silver, the flash of humor
in your Albanian eyes, the sage advice, the
bad jokes you carried in your well-worn pockets?

4.

We are all assigned an entrance and an exit,
or maybe we choose the exact moment and
the circumstances of our stay.
I waited out long nights and in between
the ordinary moments of days full
of toil and pleasure, greeted you at long
last in my own quiet heart finally echoing
all the questions, the answers glowing
in the dark, having been there all along,
like stars.

-Melinda Coppola