OK, just three more.
"My Father's Ashes."
The urn was so heavy, small but so heavy,
I could hardly lift it.
Like the time, weeks before he died, when he needed to pee
and I helped to lift him.
Got my shoulder unto his armpit, my cheek along his naked
freckled one back, while he fumbled
in front with the urinal.
He had lost half his body weight,
and yet he was so heavy, we could hardly hold him up,
till he got the fluid out crackling and sputtering
like a gold fire.
The small stainless urn had that same kind of final heaviness.
It warmed slowly to my touch, as I
stood rubbing it under the blue fig tree,
stroking it as I had stroked his skin after he died,
in firm, steady circles.
Near us, the shovel got the last dirt out of the grave.
It must have made that same gritty scraping
noise, when we scraped his ashes out of the grate.
The others would be here any minute,
and I wanted to open the urn as if then I would finally
know him.
And the wet line under the trees, with their small cones
sealed in a heavy cloak of rosin.
I tore my nails trying to open the thing.
recessed central top like his humidor lid.
I clawed at it like someone trying
to escape from a stone cell with their bare hands,
and then it gave and slipped off easily.
And there it was, the actual murder of this Earth.
Small, speckled balls of foam like tiny eggs, a darkened bent
curl of bone like a black fungus arching
to fit the curve of a branch.
Spotted pebbles, and the spots where
the channels of his marrow, where the living orbs
of the molecules swam powerfully,
as if by their own strong will.
And then each cell the chromosomes
tensed, and flashed.
Tore themselves away from themselves
like lovers, leaving their shining duplicates.
I looked at the jumble of shards, like a crushed hive,
the mass of broken order, was that the bone of his wrist?
Was that from the large elegant knee he had bent in the sun
and flexed in the water over and over?
Was that his jaw?
His skull that at birth was flexible yet.
I stood and loved him, bone and the ash it lay in.
Silvery white as the shimmering coils of dust
the Earth leaves behind it as it rolls.
You can hear its heavy roaring as it rolls away.
[APPLAUSE]