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for a Cooper’s hawk up
high.
    How long the days seem to me sitting here, seven
hours apart. No one talks about distance anymore. Everything’s a
matter of time travel. There are silent conversations we all have
with each other, with the wraiths, with the big, beautiful skyward
women. Those conversations are just prayers, I guess, requests for
understanding, dreams of being understood. I remember several days
after the snows a mess of thistle seed and tiny sparrow foot prints
at the base of the backyard feeder. The light was heartening. Do
you remember when you cut the tops of the spruce trees for our
Christmas trees? Those strange trees. In that morning snow light
over thistle and sparrow footprints.
    They say it’s not really genetic.
    That maybe you soaked it in. There
are your hands in the lamplight, the veins and tendons and length.
Do you think this disease came from those years of washing your
hands in the formaldehyde that brought corpses to the lab? I
remember you laughing, scaring me by pulling a dead cat up out of a
plastic barrel. There must have been fifty dead cats in there all
submerged in preservative. You probably shouldn’t have just stuck
your bare hand in there like that. It’s that kind of thinking that
brings the wraiths. So I stare like you taught me to stare. And she
is there again, singing. She is bent over her work and dutiful to
the land. She pulls and works the fields. And she does not mind.
And she knows what I never will know about you. She must. Someone
must. You cannot go without someone knowing. Who is she? Who have
you told your stories to, Daddy? Where can I find her?
    But she’s not telling. She sings, “Come and follow
me. I’ll make you worthy. Come and follow me. I’ll make you fishers
of men.”
    They say people, place, or thing. Fine. And the
people hurt. And the places hurt. And things hurt. Your bird books.
Your telescope. Your driving lessons. Your camera. Thoughts of your
lawn-mowing shoes and red Heifer Project International hat. Your
black socks. Your watch. Your desk chair. Those great scissors in
your desk drawer. The tools. The shed. The paint. All of it. All of
the integuments we knew of you.
    I imagine you so often. Awake and afraid. Asleep and
unknowing. A moment of awareness and more and more hours of
nothing.
    They told me the name of this thing you have, as if
it mattered, as if I might want to know what exactly was happening
and how.
    If it were anyone else, I would have looked it
up.
    Give him a break, God. Let him be spared too much.
Wherever he is, let him hear birds and see wildflowers in the
ditches along the way. Make his journey quick. Do not betray him.
He has worshipped this world’s beauty for seventy years. Let him
be. Give him his freedom. Give him his peace. Give him his dignity
back in our memories. Let him be. Just leave him alone. Leave him
alone.
    And yet I laugh at that phrase. Our culture’s most
protective phrase is so devastating. “Leave him alone.” We jump to
the defense, but what do we say? We say, “Leave him alone.” Where
is the hope of a connection? Where is the promise of a
relationship? Where is the unified front? It must not be. Leave him
alone. The most courageous phrase we can utter is for another to be
left and to be the only one around.
    So true underneath. So horrible in the living
out.
    But She is there, Dad. Don’t
worry. She is waiting with some kind of release. She sings and
mends her nets. She works the fields of the sky and undoes the
doing up. She must not be afraid, like I am. She must not be buried
alive by this, like I am. She must already know. So I trust her. I
have to. Become your own time of leave him
alone . Become your own beautiful way. And
even if I’m left alone I will be with you tiling the floors,
painting the doorjambs, picking out Christmas trees, sweeping the
gravel off the driveway, trimming the juniper bushes, and watching
so many birds fly.

 
VARIANCE

    Men vary. There are those who move