My Father’s Ashes
his charred bits of bone, his beautiful
evaporated hair, his vanished fingertips,
wait in a silver container on the ground
as a man with sun-dried skin and stringy hair
presses a shovel into the earth in front of
my sisters, my mother and me. Now the stranger’s
graceful, cigarette-yellowed fingers place my father
into the black hole, carefully as a chalice borne
from an altar, and I see the earth then, the way it’s a surface
we stand on, a child’s drawing of people like
flower petals extending out from a ball of a world.
Mindfully, the man spoons the dirt back in, sprinkling it
on my father, pausing to pick out rocks like jewels,
roots like worms he cannot harm. I think of
dry cake mix drifting from cellophane into a silver bowl,
all those chocolate cakes, all those birthdays, Dad’s face
alit with candles. I think of Dad lifting a sack of planting soil
like a body bag over his shoulder. I think of my hand
on his back as he exhaled the last time. I think of nothing,
nothing, just watch as the man tamps down the dirt
with a special tool made just for this, it seems. He crowns
the mound with a plaque (my father’s name, a ghost of his face)
and wipes his hands across his jeans, streaks of brown world
over denim blue. And I do what they do in the movies,
knowing it’s a cliché but I have no choice. It is as though
Dad has called me, pulled me toward him, and I collapse
on his grave and sob. My sisters and mother loom over me.
There I kneel, prostrate to the women of my family,
beneath layers of sky, beneath my childhood image of god,
above the rocks, the roots, the worms, my father.
Kate Evans is the author of a poetry collection,
Like All We Love (Q Press) and a book about
lesbian and gay teachers, Negotiating the Self
(Routledge). Her poems, stories and essays
have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous
publications, including the North American
Review, Santa Monica Review, Indiana Review,
Seattle Review and ZYZZYVA. She teaches
creative writing at San Jose State University,
where she is also the co-director of the Center
for Literary Arts.
Like All We Love (Q Press) and a book about
lesbian and gay teachers, Negotiating the Self
(Routledge). Her poems, stories and essays
have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous
publications, including the North American
Review, Santa Monica Review, Indiana Review,
Seattle Review and ZYZZYVA. She teaches
creative writing at San Jose State University,
where she is also the co-director of the Center
for Literary Arts.
Kate Evans
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