In memory of May 

“Feel me to do right,” your father whispered
to you out of the blue of two silences:
his shyness, his dying. How beautifully
the words bespoke their reticence, implying
they said all there was to say .. . only doing
remained—to do—and feeling, to be felt.
And surely he felt he’d said enough and was done,
might turn his thought elsewhere, for now he read
once more from the pure page of his closed lids,
translating as he went into Absolute.
His clear gift became your clouded legacy 
—for there the riddle of his remains lay open
and shut to your anxious conjecturing,
and here were all of you trying to reach him
by following instructions, asking and asking,
“What do you mean? What is it we’re to do?
And is that your order? Or supplication?
Or both together? —as if you are at once
above and below us, nowhere, everywhere . . . dad?”