Said

By David Rivard

I fed my father what

as it turned out the future

would call his last meal

(tho at the time neither

he nor I was required to

think it that exactly)—

ground chourico & chopped

green pepper open-faced

on a burger bun, french fries,

a cupcake with icing almost

chocolate in flavor—alarming,

a departure from his diet

of low-sodium, zeroed-out

trans fats & sugar-free

vegetables with high fiber-

scores, suffering as he had

been for years from barbarian

cholesterol & geriatric

diabetes (the nurse shrugged

simply & said "why not?"—

meaning of course that

we should get it, all of us,

he was going to die,

and soon). A few loose

chitters of ground sausage

fell onto his johnnie

from the fork I lifted

to his mouth—they left

tiny, paprika-red dots

of oil on the sheer cotton,

prussic red, corpuscle red

like the small scabs my sister

and I had left on his face

while helping him shave

the day before. A week earlier

I had visited him at home;

the day an unusually warm

day in a March unusually

cold. He was telling me how

he'd gone out into the yard

to get some sun only to return

minutes later to the house,

the wind far too strong—

he said he worried that

if the wind took his hat

from his head, he might

die while chasing it.

I made a joke—forced to,

I thought—chasing a hat,

I said, that might be

a better death than most,

I said maybe the death

certificate would read "killed

by the wind." He laughed

all right. You know, he said,

you've really got a lousy

sense of humor. Better than

nothing, I guess—(did he

say that, or did I think

it?). Later he said . . . he'd said

earlier . . . then I said . . . he

said . . . I said . . . I said . . .

I said . . . Say now that

this might be all that's left

for consolation, this

might be love at the end,

the confidences exchanged—

all these pratfalls, & this

skin chapped by a blade,

and your willing servant's

shaky hands, then a short

trip to be washed a last,

finally blameless time

(so the scriptures say)

in the blood of the lamb:

a smell like the smell of

sweetgrass burning crosswise

the length of a dry plain

and sent by a wind whose

swiftness has in it the bright

voices of kindergarteners, children

born of a hardship town.

Copyright Credit: David Rivard, "Said" from Standoff. Copyright © 2016 by David Rivard. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.

Source: Standoff (Graywolf Press, 2016)