as if he were the valedictorian 
of mourning. He’s not a talker;
he taught us to be tightlipped
to pain. If we children cried, 
he’d pinch our arms to teach us 
there’s always another hurt,
so just shut up. Dad’s been crying again, 
whose reservoir must be deep and long –
his 95 years of dammed streams 
and rivers backed up and laid end
to end would reach from here to Mars. 
That’s the red planet, cratered, un-
stable, dusty with indifference,
masked with poisonous gas. Dad’s been
crying again. He doesn’t want to live
like the last astronaut in outer space 
but all his friends have gone
into the black vacuum before him,
and he can’t retain their names
or faces. His brain has made him shy
of something like a 3rd birthday, a time
before add & subtract & wash & dress
& make your bed. Unlike the kid
whose head will fill with facts and math  
that lets him figure trajectories
of rocket ships, Dad’s head
fills with one obliterating thought:
he’ll soon be dead. He’s crying again.
And who can blame him? And what for?
He’s stored his tears for 90 years or more.
When not spanking a child, he wore a blinding
smile, a burly grace, a face unfazed by 
ponderous circumstance. He aged and
aged, to an age where nothing’s left 
to chance but death, the chance to span
a century. With brains so scrambled
he couldn’t say if God invented man or man
invented Time. He couldn’t say, for sure,    
if cart preceded horse, the chicken the egg,
the universe its inverse. He can only say  
for sure, he’s forgotten how it ends but that
it ends. And then he cries again.