The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (V)

There are all these calculators online. Square feet
into yards of stone. (Square feet have boring toes.)
The number of combinations you can make
with three digits or ninety socks or seven kinds
of joy. How long it takes to mow your lawn,
train your dog to read The Little Prince, grow up. 
Did you love him, the calculator for how long it takes
to write your father’s eulogy asks straightaway.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays but not Wednesdays?
Did he teach you how to throw a party or a punch?
Was he home when he was home or somewhere else,
a hearth of a man or more of a cloud that lost its way?
Have you become him? If you have, would you say so
in a crowd of soccer hooligans or only to yourself?
Did you love him when you were ten but not twenty,
then again at thirty-five? Is he secretly alive?
Are you writing his eulogy in advance? Are you afraid
to sleep at night? Afraid your bones are planning
their escape? And what do you mean by love?
That he bought you a red bike, a moody horse, a kite
that had a kite of its own? That he made you believe
you could be anything—a dirigible, a parable, the inventor
of a new kind of love? Did you ever ask
what he wanted to be when he grew up? If he ever needed
a day off from being your dad? Are you sad for real
or fake sad? Sad like people on TV are sad,
or like a lost, wet dog in February, or the moon
out there on its own? When I finished the questions,
the calculator told me the eulogy
would take my whole life and then some,
that assessing, praising, debating, hating, loving a father
is a river that runs dry only when you die.
There’s also a calculator for how long it takes
to dig a hole in a mountain, in water, or in
another hole. When you bury a parent,
you bury the beginning of your life.