I was eating turkey and sweet potato cottage pie,
a supposedly healthier version than the original,
when I got the call from my brother.
I asked him if she’d gone.
We were expecting our grandmother to die any day.
I asked him a few times, in fact,
and couldn’t understand
the response I was hearing on the other end,
as he kept saying him,
like, maybe he wanted me to write a hymn for her,
or maybe he was telling me
he was reading a hymn in the Bible.
I saw my ex giving me a look of concern,
which was when it hit me that
my brother was speaking the object pronoun him
to inform me in as few words as possible
that our father had died.
He told me about how he found him, and when,
and I’ll leave it there, because that’s Tim’s story to tell,
and then we hung up the phone
and I went back to eating my dinner at the table
with my ex who was very supportive during this time.
Filling my fork with the colors of fall,
I thought about my father
and all he had done and not done
as a dad, son, and husband,
and then I thought of how his mother used to ask that
I make sure he eat something
and not just drink himself asleep,
whenever I’d come down to Concord for a visit
during those final years I’d stay with him a few days
on the way up to my MFA residency in Vermont.
She once told me he only ate properly when I came down,
and I thought about how important it was to eat
if you didn’t want to entertain an untimely death,
as I let out a dram-sized sigh of relief,
then went back to the stovetop
for another, slightly larger helping of grief.
poems