My Father’s Coffin
I have lain in my father’s coffin. It was capacious, a word he would have liked. It was fresh, made of pine by men who carried measures at their belts, pencils behind their ears, and hearts inside their chests where they belonged. Capacious, a word he would have liked, would have been proud I found on the first cast: “including much, roomy, wide.” I was afraid the men had made it too big; that it wouldn’t fit inside the vault required by law. I lay awake when it was done, picturing the next day, all of us trying to squeeze it in, that large coffin, shoving and swearing, muddy and bothered by the man-made world’s tight fit. He was bothered by the man-made world’s tight fit. As a young man he chose the ocean, the top of Mount Washington, my mother who made waves. I am bothered by the man-made world’s tight fit. Driving toward his deathbed, I was annoyed by the road, unwinding narrow and obdurate. He was still warm. His belly was swollen to contain the lost blood. His liver was swollen to contain the disappointment of living. It was not his heart that failed him. His face had shrunk. It was the color of pine, the color of the box I lay in. The men needed to see how heavy it would be the next day. I weighed what he weighed dead. It was dark when the lid came over me, but I could sense the headroom, the generosity of the bed. He lies deep in it, protected from our grief.
Birkenstocks On The Bridge
In a telling last gesture he left his Birkenstocks on the bridge. As he leapt from his life, not sure where he was going, except into a gorge named Queechee by the Indians, he was barefoot. Do I need to know any more about this man but that he was twenty-nine and in dire pain, that he chose the simplest cure, rocks instead of a hard place, that he arrived pure, like a penitent, on the other side, scourged by his descent through terror? And wasn’t it the Indians who said, “Do not judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins”? Who will walk in these? Imagine the young policeman who touched them with his hands, noticing how they were placed one slightly ahead of the other, as if someone had stepped out of them to lie down, briefly, to rest. Imagine the reporter hearing this detail, asking, “What size are they?” Imagine the next of kin taking them to the Salvation Army. Imagine an army in them, Imagine salvation.
