Staggered out of a dream toward the upstairs bathroom Then I saw you You were on the hallway floor, one arm flung ahead like you were swimming across the wood You were still in your waiter’s uniform: White shirt, black pants It was three or four a.m. And I wondered if you were breathing Five, six, seven, eight seconds You didn’t breathe; I couldn’t— I lived in a future Without your legs laying across it
Poetry
FATHER
The father’s body, still marked by the uniform of wage labor, becomes the point at which the ordinary world loses its continuity. The poem renders grief as a material rupture: the loss of another person is also the collapse of a future whose very possibility depended on their presence. Mourning emerges as the recognition of our fundamental interdependence.