The Day After I Die

Now that my father is gone from all suffering
and sleeps in the roots of the Norway pine
on the land that he loved,
I have started to imagine the questions
my children will have

the day after I die.

Imagine the secret life in the gardens

and stormy hours of a guilty mind,

dark and flashing in the night sky with fear,

 

all the disappointments

creaking around in the attic

of my home,

and dust we call the body,

they will never know.  

There is a black and broken trunk in the basement

and a few boxes of letters in the eaves

that might help them understand,

an album, a few photos, and journals

with the names of strangers, poems,

and lovers they never knew.

The day after I die

they will start to tell the real stories

of the ways I loved them,

sang them to sleep,

 

and failed them

with my disappointments

and misguided men, 

made the rafters of their hearts

heave with heat and the motion

of a living homestead 

that they will come back to

when they have no place else to go.