Today's poem is by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Afterlife with Father
       

Because there was no money in it, my father
didn't approve of me writing poetry.
Once he said, Why don't you write a novel?
I was sitting on the floor with my notebook
and without looking up mumbled that
I wasn't really very good with plots.
Though I might be misremembering this,
as with my clear recollection of my brother
and I visiting his mother's grave with him,
the three of us startled by a huge crow
coming down to land on her headstone.
My brother tells me this never happened,
and he must be right because years later
when I visit her grave, there is no stone,
no nearby wall, no gate, and by then
father's had his own stone for twenty years—
two decades for rumination—and when
he appears now, nudging time's door
between us, I'm still on the floor, and he
begins talking about how much he misses
cutting the grass, sitting on the deck
at evening watching the martins swoop,
misses chocolate cake, misses the steering
wheel sliding under his palms . . . he says
again what he said more than once in
the last year of his life, I want to go home.
Now he tells me, I want to go home. Give me
my body back. Put me in a poem.

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Copyright © 2023 Jeanne Marie Beaumont All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission