MY FATHER'S SUITThe suit we chose was navy blue.He sold them, hundreds,which we helped to fit,our hands impersonal,adept, that signed the papers now,while someone dressed his bodyin the suit. Without cosmetics,in the viewing room, the facelooked green and uninhabited,lips wide and thickly set,no ghost of him, not sad,not funny, not one bitafraid-the freckle on the hand,hair, veins, what had been his,without him now, extraneous, inane,brow under my trembling right palmcool with an inhuman density,as though immovable, but not.SUNLIGHT AFTER WARM RAINBrow damped by the noonday,drops at the edge of his jawin coruscations, he stood stillin the shade of that same oakhe had climbed in another lifefor mistletoe his mother usedto liven their front door at solstice,that same oak where his fathernow lay under the drip line.GIFT
All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;and we all do fade as a leaf-Isaiah 64:6After my mother's father died,she gave me his morocco Bible.I took it from her hand, and sawthe gold was worn away, the bindingscuffed and ragged, split below the spine,and inside, smudges where her father'sright hand gripped the bottom cornerpage by page, an old man waiting, not quitereading the words he had known by heartfor sixty years: our parents in the garden,naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;blood in the ground, still calling for God'scurse-his thumbprints fading after the flood,to darken again where God bids Moses smitethe rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthewevery page. And where Paul speaks of thingsGod hath prepared, things promised them who wait,things not yet entered into the loving heart,below the margin of the verse, the paperis translucent with the oil and darkstill with the dirt of his right hand.
Copyright © 2008 by Brooks Haxton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
