for my father
 
Dad kept yellow corn from the feed store
in a garbage can out behind the shed.
Dawn and dusk, he shoved a rusty scoop 
deep into that can, dumping hard kernels
of boyhood memory on the family farm
into a galvanized pail.
 
Then he sniffed the wind and nickered
until two horses crossed the neighbor’s field 
to rest their muzzles on the split-rail fence
and talk to him.
 
And he made more horse noises, 
grinning back as they curled floppy lips 
to bare big teeth and munch this ritual gift 
from an old man lost in his yard, 
who raised that steel bucket
as if to his own mouth.

When the dead breathe their last, those atoms rise to
surround the known Earth as it rotates in place around
a black hole. The smoke from my father’s cigarette
surrounded me as I lay full-length on the back seat
of Betsy-car, our1940s Chrysler sedan, staring at
the moon riding with us down some rural highway— 
a familiar smoke that merged with the hypnotic hum
of the motor, the strobe of occasional streetlights.
 
Show me the way to go home, 
I’m tired and I want to go to bed, 
 
we’d sing as my father flicked butt after butt out
the car window. Those flickered like dying stars
along the road’s edge, leaving in our wake tinder 
for a field, sparks for a forest, and wads of paper
and shredded tobacco bleeding into sunrise.

Years ago in a fifth grade classroom, I asked students 
to write about objects I’d brought in: strangely striated 
stones, broken tools, remnants of a bird’s nest, a child’s
knit mitten I’d found in the local thrift shop along with
the worn men’s cashmere overcoat I’d remade to fit me.
 
I did not have the coat that day, but it swung in a black 
and empty closet in my mind, not my closet but another’s, 
a closet storing nothing save the coat and a pair of galoshes—
the kind with snap-shut, black metal buckles, their toes
speckled with dust from another world.
 
And as the students wrote, I cupped my hands to heft the 
memory of  objects lost and found, all a good fit for their 
time. And I intimately knew that overcoat, felt the old man 
wear it as his only company, hang it nightly to guard his 
restless sleep and fleeting dreams.
 
I saw him leave the closet open so the streetlight slanting 
through the blinds could warm the coat’s familiar shoulders,
shine its buttons, even one hanging by a thread. I heard him 
talking to the coat from the cave of his bed, knew he lived alone
somewhere on a street where it was always winter, and that he
 
often asked it, as I once heard my aging father ask my mother 
in the middle of the night, What’s going to happen to us?
I could not hear her murmured response from their bedroom 
down the hall, but my father’s question found the windows of
a row house in an invisible city, and an old coat answered it.