The Eulogy I Couldn’t Give

The eulogy I couldn't  give to my mother at her funeral 
I gave to my father at his celebration of life.

It was a sentimental piece I shaped more for comfort than truth,
imagining him— the first ghost to cross the threshold
of the house I bought in a new subdivision
still raw with fresh pavement and silence—
where I landed after the tornado took the last one

I meant to say something profound,
but the words I once shaped for my mother—and discarded
almost 34 years ago— 
became a hand-me-down suit:
too small, too ceremonial, already outgrown.

Still, It generated enough tears to match his cremated ashes-
to feel almost the first handful of dirt 
on the coffin, the grave he denied himself and others.
Only the wind snapped back reprimanding slightly my sentiment—
not in anger, but in that paternal voice that makes shame bloom slow.

It woke me up— and I stumbled back into childhood  memory,
the child I used to be—
the one who only wanted to hold his hand—

the one thing he denied me until divorce, work 
softened him enough with regret 
to gift everyone what he once denied.
“He was such a generous and loving man,”
I heard the assembled mourners comfort me with. 

I am fatherless living in the reality of non-fathers
a being whose being can be half-traced
to the hole in the ground my mother rests in.  

My father’s beard—
that thing he groomed and trimmed,
kept balanced between
devil’s goatee and G.O.A.T—
is the only thing I remember of him.

It grows in my memory,
where it casts a shadow
that I occasionally must trim—
a bit of flesh to go to, look at,
and hold in the greed of love—

until time slowly erases his name
and everything he and I— we—
all touched— becoming an echo
of earth and sky—
a eulogy of our trying.