If I could choose a day to live again,
it would be any random afternoon when,
coming home from school,
I’d find you in your upstairs room,
the cat and dog gone fast asleep
and lying in the sun,
and you would let your work lie fallow
in your lap and tell me tales
of ancient kings, of artistry,
of long-forgotten trinities that flourished in the Pharoah’s time,
the follies of Pythagoras,
of why you had no faith in god
and little more in man.
Your room is silent now,
and we attend to trivialities
of stocks, insurance, clothing
that you will not wear again.
I hear your voice a hundred times a day,
fill in the spaces where your laughter would be heard,
and wait for your sly comments
and your crooked smile.
I have feared this day, and feared that when you left me
I’d be paralysed, that lack of you would break me
and I’d lose my way.
But memory is stronger than I ever knew,
and memory forged in love
is stronger still.
I feel your shaping of me in my bones,
as clay must feel the imprint of the sculptor’s hand.
My own small mind cannot accept
that this could be an ending.
I share your disbelief in heaven,
bit it does not stop me wishing
I may find you there.
If I could wish a heaven for you,
and in wishing make it so,
it would be a heaven filled with books and music,
long white beaches with no footprints in the sand,
a yellow dog to warm your feet in winter,
and the hope that I may someday join you there.

April 9, 1996
New Port Richey, Florida