May 28

by Ellen Steiber

I can't get at the truth of you

Between us twenty-five years

In which you are here with me

And no longer here

You left us memories . . . .

The sight of you

Getting off the bus each evening

Striding toward the house

Your arms open wide

To the three girl children racing down the sidewalk

The sound of your voice

singing, "You are my sunshine  .  .  ."

Loud and joyous and gloriously off key

The scent of Old Spice

That we gave you every Father's Day

Until the medicine cabinet was lined with bottles

Each bearing a delicate blue clipper ship

Late-August days in the Adirondack Mountains

Rowing along the shoreline to the rocks where the fish fed

Your daughters, instant disaster

Our lines snared on the rocks, tangled in the lily pads

Your efforts to be patient as you freed us again and again

(You'd wanted sons all along)

And your true patience

When you caught the biggest bass of the summer

And I, feeling sorry for it, threw it back

Autumn campfires on the beach at Coney Island

All of us windswept and shivering

Noses running, hands sticky with sand and melted marshmallows

And laughing — I remember my hair blowing into my teeth as we laughed

Because we were together with our cousins

And for you nothing could be better

The silver and turquoise bracelets you brought me

I wear them still

And that night

That last walk you took across an unlit highway

We waited on the shoulder of the road

And when a kind man stopped, asked, "Is everything okay?"

I answered, "Fine. Some luggage blew off the roof and my father went to get it."

"Oh," he said, "because I thought someone got hit."

And I, night-blind even then, couldn't see it

"Everything's fine," I told him

These memories, they don't touch the half of it

Not your pain

For the father you never knew

The mother you lost

The friends you couldn't save

Not your terror at your own waning strength

Nor the bone-deep surety we all shared

That yours would be the first death

All I know is that

Since that night

When you walked across the highway

I cannot touch you

You have left me glimpses of a place I can no longer enter

And even those glimpses are wrong

Death has sewn your image to grief

And I must loosen those stitches

I have spent a lifetime feeling I could not find my true home

Now I see that all these years

I have been homesick for you

I was your sunshine

But you were my sun

I live now in the Sonora

A place so alien to the world you gave us

I wake to winter skies flooded with light

To blazing summer days when the earth thirsts for rain

Like all desert dwellers I mold my life to the course of the sun

All that is woven

Fades and loosens beneath it, nothing holds

Not even the stitches of grief

I am fully in the sun's land

What other place for one who has

So longed for your warmth?