RELATIONSHIP Poem: Dad, No Elegy, by Stephen Mead

This snow is appropriate, finally enough
after a winter of global warming here in the northeast.
Dad, it’s all been too strange to predict what will happen
to good farming weather come spring,
as I picture your weathered farmer’s fingers
planting potatoes, making mounds.

I picture them so easily alive in some other place
for although this snow is not bitter, it signifies closing
with the wind’s damp whiteness finding our cheeks.

Yes, a thoughtful tarp shelters us, iron staking
heavy Dutch blue plastic sky like a suture
for the sleeting sheets of surrounding grayness,
but the shade’s still too cold to focus on mourning.

Mourning, the word of course conjures Victorian rites,
at least black arm bands & carriage horses
sober with their freight.

Instead, your hearse has a polished bullet-sheen
& this limousine’s too modern, too missile-like
when you were the peacefulness of earth’s salt
&, at age 89, still a harvest.

What is grief then if not the Ashokan Farewell
my partner plays on his cell phone
to at last let our swollen feelings spill
with something like loosening?

There is no ease to letting go,
our huddled figures round your hole now seem to realize,
touching the wood of your coffin as if giving up protest
against goodbye.

I ask the diggers, the directors, if we can toss your roses
upon its gleaming oak, but they grunt ludicrously about stains,
then reassure that those blossoms will be placed as is custom
once the carved metal cover is fitted upon your slow final lowering.

We acquiesce, taking petals as mementos
to mark the surreal passage of this day,
but approach the stems the way the snow does,
something inside of us falling further too.

In Spring the old grindstone from your farm
my partner made into a fountain
will collect the welling rings.

Garden or not, in the new twists of global warming,
we’ll think of you & mom then settled together deep
while the rising geyser gushes, indigo foam
like melting snow, creating flame.