Dear David,
Thank you for your message. I will be too happy to see you here.
And I would love to come out to California to visit you there. Love,
Dad
—my father's last email to me
I'm back home laying
strips of sodden newspaper
over his dream-face
to create a death
mask whose features I barely recognize
as my father's.
The house-high forehead,
a skew of nose, blown back hair
like stubborn sea grass—
whitened, retreating—
double chin that threatens to
triple, familiar smirk of lips.
There seems to be more
of him than I remember.
The spongy soup
of plaster-of-Paris swirls
in the plastic bowl.
I'm close to the end.
As the last slap seals
his stoppered mouth a burble
distends smeary words
and his sunken chest
rises high. Clawing through
what I've created,
I pull apart thin shells
of gluey plaster and
pry open his lips,
seal my open
mouth to his and force
my hot breath into him,
cross palms and press
just below his sternum, hard.
Then look up. Nothing.
I stop shaking him.
Retrieve shreds of wet newsprint
from the floor, refit
casts to their places.
Begin again to cover
him. Dad just lies there
while I do my work.
Plaster sucks all the moisture
from the empty room.
Eighteen-eighty-seven.
In this print, the Dartmouth Inn
wears a blotchy skin,
only know it's fire
by the caption. Snaking hoses
carve over white snow.
Men hold a snake's head,
from which an arc intersects
the white of the flame.
In this photo they're
the same. Fire and water
reduced to smeary
chemical traces.
White sky fills glassless windows
where one wall still stands.
Carriage on runners
—the horse unhitched
while skittish with fear—
trails abandoned reins.
In the foreground a silhouette
suggests a man, hands
deep in his pockets,
watching the fuss, as I do,
across distances.
My father's face, falling
as he ages. A grand hotel
coming down in stages.
Not this sudden fire,
but a quiet diminishment
that still gives off heat.
David Sullivan's first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and three of its poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a multi-voiced manuscript about the war in Iraq, was published by Tebot Bach. A book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet was published in 2013. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children. He was awarded a Fulbright, and is teaching in China 2013-2014 (yesdasullivan.tumblr.com). His poems and books can be found at davidallensullivan.weebly.com.