My Father Died Last Night

My father died last night.
His body long as a casket
gaunt as a heron
gnarly as roots
soon buried beneath the shade of a pin oak tree.

My father died last night.
I held his hand and watched his neck
a tiny bluish tick under paper thin skin
suddenly melt to stillness.

Ninety-two years he was a river of blood.
His Indiana father coursing through time
to my New York children
as surely as the Wabash is a varicose vein
meandering from Ohio to Illinois.

My father died last night.
Tomorrow the earth swallows him,
smothered by the same dry, thirsty grass
covering his mother and father and wife, and secretly,
the ashes of his old dog.

My father died last night.
At home in his bed by the window,
his long carpentering fingers lacing mine
still larger in death
than my own fingers warmed by life.