I’ve stopped remembering the order of events
and most peripheral facts about the urn in Minnesota
which my brother put down a hole he dug

through autumn grass to keep my mother’s ashes,
or how I heard about the plastic bag in Florida
of my father’s dust, perhaps now in a closet

among his widow’s boxes waiting for us
to meet and strew what’s left.
If I am late, keep a cup of him for me.

We are mostly made of water.
I will take him to Colorado up an unpaved road
to a place he’s never been perhaps

that scrambles up between the canyon walls.
A cold creek bounces down there bright and keen
even without sunlight, rushing over rounded rocks.

In winter, at night, I went there many times after I left.
I want to go again with him to where the snowflakes
laze to land on old black rocks

and we will climb, my dad and I,
beside the melting stream coursed by ice
and hear my boot-falls, my shortened breaths

at altitude, the sluicing rush of creek
gushing over shelves of ice as pieces crack and fall,
float and break, sink to rise and go where all creeks go.

The winter caps these canyon walls with cloud.
To look up into snowflakes is to believe
we are in some better place, a place where dragons rise.

I will take my cup of father out and hold my breath
and tip it there. For a moment, he will darken
snow then join the swirling water home.

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Eric Arthur Mecklenburg is originally from Minnesota but has lived in many places outside of America. At the moment, he is working for an oil company in Saudi Arabia, writing his first collection of poems, and planning to move to Skyros, Greece.

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