Let’s meet where the tables are empty
at 7. I can remember,
and so do not have to imagine,

the April evening light coming in
off the bricks, through the glass
rattled like snare skin by the bass

thrum of busses and trucks
on 65th. The tables round
and black, they really are

like pools of emptiness with glasses
of water suspended by life’s magic
antigravity effect, to say nothing

of the orbits of planets, that successful
reluctance to plummet into their suns,
even when life may not have begun

on most of them, there is no one
to meet, no table taking
the evening light back into blackness,

the suspense of love does not hover
in fingers lifting the specials sheet,
and there’s no coming of night

Knowing my father’s soon to die, I
dreamt of Heaven, a wide deck
suspended over a highway. I was
checking it out as a care facility—
the chairs and chaise lounges rickety
things, woven plastic straps
lashed to aluminum tubing.

There were areas out of the glare,
under corrugated green fiberglass
awnings up on wrought-iron struts.
And the dead all about were milling
in variable states of haze,
in tennis outfits, bathing suits.
Where were the courts, the pools?

No conversation—only the drone
of the road below. Nothing new
to learn from that real-world song. I left
for the parking garage. Could I tell
my father about this place? Would I
want him to know, or just let him
see for himself when it’s time?

He sinks away, less himself
and more a swollen sessile mass
planted in its hospice bed,

his eyes’ whites like pond ice,
his lips unlicked and cracked,
his teeth in gluey jackets,

voice a scratchy aftermath
of what he meant to say and can’t,
each breath his chest’s next

fight with gravity — it asks
the question. The question springs
itself, up from the lumpen flesh,

the sinking country of his body,
and with all this history
in evidence, we, who lean

against the rails in reverence,
we cannot pose the question
properly. The fox who watched us

as we walked the creek-side trail
through the woods behind
the hospital just yesterday

held the question out to us
as well, before it disappeared
into the silence of the brush.