Smiling Back from the Afterlife

I meet my father for breakfast

in some life after Alzheimer’s. He smiles:

Are you still my daughter? The first sick joke

from the afterlife begins on the phone.

I say, I regret that I am. His skull

knobbed yellow and blue, bruised

from an unremembered mishap, I imagine his face

the color of a car’s undercarriage, the sun

from his ocean view window

catching the green mica flecks in his eyes.

His thoughts float on the surface, torn

out of context. He’s dying, he says:

ninety-two and a ragpile wreck.

He throws down the paper.

Still all assholes! he proclaims and asks

the word for forgetfulness. I remind him

it’s CRS syndrome: Can’t Remember Shit.

His favorite joke lives on in my memory.

Everything between us lives in me,

so when I leave him in his black leather chair,

I feel his confusion pelting my back.

Do I know you? Your name is Rachel, right?

The phone catches his frown, then smile

in its black brick, photo grim as a toe tag.

Still your daughter, I say from the airport.

Now I’m on a plane and as far

as he’s concerned, I might as well be

in the afterlife. I’m mulching him

over, planting him in memory,

watering him with thin answers,

sure that he’ll spring up in life after

this, my old deep-rooted weed.