Of all the things I owe you—
including my life & the care you took to raise me
until I could raise myself—
I owe you most of all
my sense of how fragile things are,
how quickly they can end,
how nothing lasts.

You didn’t last—
neither you, Daddy, from heart disease at 53,
raving in your hospital bed
about rats in the room,
nor you, Mama, at 46,
on your way to work, rounding a curve
into the glare of a brilliant sunrise
& the rear of a stopped school bus
carrying my brother.

I rushed home both times—
from Yellowstone, from Basic at Fort Knox—
but you’d taken it with you
into the dark.

I’m older now than either of you,
your faces mixed up in mine,
getting old as you might have
if you’d had the chance.

Sometimes I look at a photograph of you
before I was born,
leaning on each other in a dusty driveway—
each other’s pillar,
pillars to sons soon to come—
& give thanks that I’m no one’s pillar,
fragile as I am.