The speaker of RG Evans’s poem bids a dying father farewell in this passionate reflection.
After They Finish With You
Did you dream the afterlife
would be such a mess as this?
All that’s meant to be
private finally public:
your groin, its gray nest gone,
scrotum, vas, and prostate
knife-slipped one by one.
Latexed hands caress
your colon, climb your spinal cord,
weigh your aged heart
against the standard,
your lungs which hold
what remains of your last breath,
squeezed by strangers into foreign air.
Only your head remains
a mystery till the last
bone is bared, shrouded
by a soaking towel.
Only I know what lies
beneath that dripping mercy,
eighty years of images
that passed through the slate
of your eyes: mountains,
trains and beautiful women,
all you had to share,
drying to dust among the dendrites.
After they finish with you, father,
they’ll lift the towel and there
you’ll be, just as I’ve always known you,
and I will snap on the gloves
and dig in.
***
Originally published in Lips.
Editor’s Note: RG Evans has published with us before. Read “Smoke,” his phenomenal poem on being a father who does not have all the answers.
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Raw, but very elegant. True to the bone. Bob Evans delivers, his poetry allows me to feel from deep within.