The Lares

On my way home after 
working nightshift at the hospital,
I see wreckage common here in Utica
at winter’s end—two deer carcasses 
tossed onto snowbanks beside the road. 
Of course, I think about their fawns, old enough 
to be on their own—oblivious. 
And I think of human children—
times when I have seen 
one in a park, crying alone.
 
Because no death is insignificant, 
because I’m too tired to mourn 
these bodies lying there 
like a pair of dolls forgotten outside after playtime, 
I speed up. I concentrate on the stoplight, 
and how the March sky graduates from indigo 
in the west, to light blue, to pink. 
 
I have no idea where they go—the struck animals: deer, raccoons…
Someone has that job. Later this morning,
he will load their bodies onto a truck and drive off…
 
Our bodies, left over, excess once our breath goes out of us,
are wheeled into the hospital basement on gurneys 
before we are put into the ground…
 
Somewhere in this valley, they remain buried—
the bodies that made my body. 
I only know the names of a few,
remember only three or four plots. 
I never bring flowers.
 
Hours later, after trying to sleep, I open 
old photo albums and hold 
a mirror up to compare this face with those, 
how the chin changed 
over time, the nose, the forehead.
There is a common face. Whose? 
 
We used to believe—if we did not honor the memory 
of our mothers and fathers—they would set up obstacles for us. 
If our negligence went on long enough,
they would come to find us in our homes, demanding 
glasses of wine, meals
cooked for them as they cooked 
for us. The dead, we thought, 
do not lose their thirst or hunger. 
They do not stop loving 
the sound of human voices. 
 
Maybe this afternoon, it will finally happen. 
I will walk down Genesee St. when someone,
a stranger, I think, will bump into me.
Rather than say, excuse me, and continue walking,
this man—my father’s father,
who died almost twenty years before I was born—
will hold me by the arm, so tight it hurts,
and when I try to pull away, he’ll ask:
Why haven’t you come to find me?
Why have you left me alone?