Your father is stuck in the past, an oxbow lake
left behind in the curve of time’s waste. Your grief
is anchored to his death, a line of memories unspooling
behind you as you drift forward in the river’s searching.

Like water tipped from a cup carried to bed, or the splash
on the bathroom tile from a too-full tub, it is hard to gather
your sadness without spilling more of it, a measure
of a body bound only by the negative space it brims.

Each day is a new attempt to survey grief’s coursing,
each food-triggered memory, each line of music heard
in his nobody’s-watching voice. And it’s impossible to tell
which life supplies your sorrow, his rigored past, or his future,

evaporated. You’re living every day in new depths,
each waking a plumb line fed into the dark body
surrounding you. But to see how deep the river really runs,
you will need to be something other than the river.