2006 - Vol. 3, Issue 4

Dying is when the last season
    never changes again.
                           —Yehuda Amichai

I.
What keeps the engine of life going?

Tall, he used to stride through
his 90–year life scrawled
in longhand and shorthand.

In this warm October,
a day rolled through the day,
hinging the rusty remnants of his life
to his hospital room, walls, bed.

Alzheimers knocked down
that strong soldier of WWII,
emptying his memory,
where used to reside

his wife of forty years, his children,
his engineer's smartness,
hundreds of books, as if all neurons
were worn off from long use.

His brain cells lost the connection
like dropped puppetry strings
to his legs, arms, eyes behind closed lids,
to his children's sadness.

He couldn't love anymore —
his heart and body
didn't remember how.

All feelings leaked from his bare being,
leaving there only a hint of breath
and pain, muffled by morphine.

But inertia kept the inner wheels moving,
pushing blood through his thin body.
Then, they made the last turn and stopped
and his soul expired. Where did she go?

II.
How to save my father's image?

Rabbis said — in prayers,
my friends said — in memory,
but I would try — in a poem.

I pasted his image on a page —
not the last one in the hospital bed —
unshaven, bone–white, with the gaping mouth,

but many lively others of his long, long life.
I leafed through the old sepia gallery of memory,
hearing his laughing voice:

young, handsome in a WWII uniform
at the door of our Moscow apartment,
holding inside his eyes the longing

for my long–waiting mother and eight–year–old me,
his carrying a wooden red slogan in the May parade
with the naïve acceptance of the party's dictum,

his teary, long face at my mother's funeral
blankly lost without her stern rudder,
his eighty–year–old bravery in JFK airport.

Then all pictures, words, self–recognition
slipped away from him like a wet fish from
a futile grip into murky water of non–future.

I have woven a safety net from the poetry lines
to catch fading, flapping images of him.
What has been left is memory and a poem.

"Requiem for My Father" first appeared in New Jersey Works, November 2004.