Sometimes I feel the presence
of the dead, only to convince myself later
it was merely a shadow moving on the far wall
of my desire to see beyond the curtain
between here and there as if loss
were merely a matter of waiting
in a room for the return of love, a chance
to undo or unsay, but no
amount of time will bring back those
we’ve lost because they never abandoned us.
We abandoned them by staying alive.

If I were to die my father said
preparing his will
and I wanted to say but didn’t
there’s no if about it.
The only certainty is that life doesn’t last.
We have a string of moments and move on.

When my daughter stands in front of me,
a grown woman concerned about my health,
I remember the child and my hand on her forehead
feeling the fever, a necessary excess of will
spilling into the world, and I remember
her diving into the deep end of the pool
in a game of Gator, swimming along the bottom
well below the bigger boys who tried
to catch her, part of the game
continued even now.

And when my son lifts a giant wooden beam
over his head and holds it
while the other carpenters secure the ends,
the householder stands with her arms crossed,
eyes wide, momentarily awed
by the magnificent strength of this one man.

And every one…my daughter caring for patients
in a small Botswana hospital,
my son rehabbing houses
after rehabbing himself,
their mother designing a playground
in unceded Mi’kmaq land,
the carpenters, the householder,
the woman laboring in a narrow bed,
even the child swinging high in the air
her shoes tied by love
and pointed toward heaven
will soon die and be forgotten.

And then it’s dawn. Unexpected
light comes through the window
with graceful possibility.
The distinct nothingness of my life
suddenly seems glorious,
a particle of dust dancing in the light
beside eight billion others
while outside, a boy glides by on a bicycle
delivering the important stories of the day.