Placeholders for a Father [Found During His Mother's Funeral]
       

How else to explain those hands, how he sits in the pew
just a little too neatly, something sudden and secret
about those arms and legs, about the body that pulled my body

forth from nothing, or maybe—assuming there is a god and religion
really does mean return—from wherever god hides us before
we enter here. He is noticeable in his stillness. I imagine

his arm lifted, the space of his hand a cradle supporting
our cordless phone—as it does every December when he calls
to tell me Rudolph is on PBS. Where do we say we are from

once our parents have died? I save their voicemails. Almost
out of storage, I delete photos and apps so I can keep on saving
their voices—year after year on record, all the sound aging makes

stored on some unseen bit of plastic machinery like a personal
cyber—audio scrapbook. My father has always loved history books.
Sitting with him at the kitchen table after dinner, I learned

how to draw the letters that made my name—Historians—he said—
are the memory of the world. He pressed my fingers to the pencil,
made his hand a cast so mine would have a mold in which to fit—

told me—They are responsible for writing it all down. Before the service
we walked up to the body single file. We covered her hands
and kissed her forehead, but we moved no part of her—this woman—

the loss of whom I will never really feel. For a long time I could
have said—No one I've known has died, but then I saw the two boys
I'd grown up with become fatherless—both dads dead by the time

we took the SAT's, both having gotten the cancer, and both having lived
a few months longer than expected. I used to watch their profiles
in Biology, wait for echoes, shades. Then we grew up and went to school,

and Derek became a doctor while Paul went crazy—lost his mind
in that way where you don't come back. Now, if I think of the body
as a house, it is almost possible to understand how no one might be

home, how everything has to be held in place by something outside
of itself. Other things happened the year of mine and my brother's
car accident. For months before she went to sleep and woke up

without breasts, my mother drove herself to the hospital and laid
shirtless on a metal table under an invisible curtain of radiation.
I don't know how many times or for how long. They were trying

to kill that part of her that didn't know it was killing itself. My father
was never there. When I was older, she showed me how the doctors
had marked these places, had left behind a series of small, black targets.

How to admit it? That the human body can be our greatest humiliation—
and knowing it, how, then, are we supposed to allow someone else
to enter? When I imagine being a parent, I think of skin grafts: my mother

ordering a surgeon to take from her whatever my legs needed. I think
of my father carrying me up the stairs when I was too sleepy to walk,
and I know that I do not understand what grief or sadness feels like.

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Copyright © 2021 Samantha Deal All rights reserved
from Something Opened
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission