My father has donned a skeleton this week—
angular bones bulge from his cheeks

restless fingers barely papered with skin
fidget and scratch like a screen door off its hinge.

He has no secrets left to disclose. Burning
he bares his chest to the air like Tarzan,

proclaims he’s ready to leave—but to where?
He wants to stand up and go downstairs.

He knows deep down he’s encumbered
by ports, IV tubes, and a catheter.

His anger flares as though from the smolders
as he pulls and urges his body upward

he’s almost angry enough to unhook his penis
and spray his piss out on the lot of us

who’ve chained him he must think to this bed
he now accepts as his final resting place

In an instant he rolls down his lids and sleeps— 
a deep snore rattles his open throat

his teeth, blackened and yellowed—coated
in slime. His open jaw bears his skull.

For five or six hard frosts my peach tree
held onto one leaf at a top branch

until today, when the doctor called and asked
us to let my father go. I looked out the window

at my bare tree. The last leaf clung so long—
now free. Yesterday my father 

opened his eyes for me. I said
I love you. I’ve come to say good-bye.

He echoed my good-bye with his own
and Where am I going? he asked.

This was no time to lie. “You’re going 
to die,” I said. “You’re going to die.”
                        

	After a photograph of my grandmother when a teenager on a stage in 1914

All you have to do is stand still
pretty girl and all the boys will 
flock to you. Brush out your horsetail  
locks lace your long slender legs
into leather boots made just for you—
.
But you know you are not just 
a pretty girl all pom-pommed and posed 
clothed and painted whiter than a rose. 
Rest your chin on your thumb
convey the strategic thinker you’ll become—

Today in 1914 you have everything—
your stage so small on this brink of war, no inkling 
of that next one—Nazis knocking at your door—
and that you’d lose all this and more. Be poised, strong.
Do you really pretend nothing can go wrong?