SENTENCE

Questions arise with the sun. Now that your bed is empty,
What unites us but your failings? What to talk at tea?

In the afternoon, the commas stretch the unease between us,
Survivors. How freely you distributed your gift to us all, italicizing

Our lives to a constant neurosis. We do not trust the tears
The mirror sheds as we run past each other, uncertain as ellipses,

Into our rooms. Nor the breakdowns in the shower, subtext
Of hyphenated silences that fail to explain the context?

From your vacant chair, we can still hear, like echoes from afterlife,
Peremptory appeals for your teeth; then, the semicolon, the bored wife

Of pause, before your peacock’s screech of triumph on discovery,
When your suicidal daughter finds it laughing in water in a glass.

(Last night, in the hall, you made a sickly appearance: thin as a line
With a rounded head, an exclamation mark, aghast at your own absence.)

The who you looked for through your eliding selves down the years was
The what you never met: your father, the captain. You put him, enemy

At birth, to trial at all hours; awarded death by hanging in media res,
A sentence without a beginning or end, so unlike his army boots. Drilled,

We swore by decorum, and fastened ourselves to prayers as in a nave.
Against the oiled sky, the banyan chatters, the wind shaking the leaves
Without caesura or sense as we, lost, follow your many voices to the grave.