When the archivist at Ellis Island met my father
a few years before his death and asked
what was the most memorable time of his life,
he said it was the War but wouldn’t embellish.

And when he got sick, the family gathered, waiting
for the aneurysm to burst, with hospice nurses
in eight-hour shifts to catheterize him,
give him shots of hydromorphone for the pain.
They were professionally attentive, sidetracked
only once in a while by a magazine, a cell phone,
the food Mom couldn’t stop cooking.

Except for nurse Carlos, back two years
from a tour in Iraq, who never for a second
took his eyes off Dad, soaked up his accounts
of Okinawa, sat with him in the bathroom,
watched him gaze out the window,
eased the coffee cup from his hand
when he dozed in his chair.
Nurse Carlos—a rock from East Newark,
buzz-cut, laconic. Keep Watch
burned in black on his neck. 
Dad—his tired tales and the soul we doubted,
laced with the prayers of the battlefield dead.

So it was surely as the old Seabee had dreamed
a thousand times: After he went in for a nap,
Carlos in tow, the rest of us joking, reminiscing,
making plans in the living room,
a soldier was the last one to see him alive.