After a Funeral the house where death has entered is quiet is noisy too many voices too many whispers accusing not yet comforting the sweet smell of wilting chrysanthemums accosts… what you did what you did not do handwritten cards hold their studied distance as sunlight tracks new dust across unchanged mahogany from the kitchen where words are not spoken, an odour of dinner turned low and the silence of a widow still unsure how to wear her new clothes His Felt Cap Between monitor and keyboard it rests lightly on my Oxford New Thesaurus for the 1990s, wordless for all that, his felt camel-coloured cap. Some might deem it shabby yet it musters the shape of his head, how it crowned, tilted; I remember that he wore it jauntily, askew. Thus it sat on the head of such a man, my father — serious, worried, perfunctory, a man who gave commands, expected results. How many times it warmed his head, taking shape from his particular synthesis of bone, hair and grey matter… aged in the swirl of cigarette smoke and a widower’s portion. On his seventy-fifth birthday we went to Market bought cheese, breathed deeply past stands of dulse (quietly remembering my mother’s love of it) and freshly harvested seafood, swallowing the old salt aroma of primal spawning grounds… Finally we found the soft ice cream stand. A peacock strutting, he made much of choosing from 24 flavours, my father who never enjoyed shopping now playing at it with his only daughter. A benediction borrowed from ancient cathedrals, light found his cap, settled on it, transformed it. I remember how he came alive for me that day, his felt cap drawing rays to itself as the sun draws water. In My Imagination I imagine your room, the big window facing south, the cold brightness of winter opening up, the bed you adjust yourself I imagine friends family and others visiting you, palliative care workers keeping the background This is the room where you will die, it is not home but you are surrounded by love; I imagine your morphined mind looking for a balance, groggy, your mind that was always exact, your ready wit I imagine you in that homely room become the paradox as you always did?—?grateful, still asking the questions I cannot imagine a world without you, focus instead on that window facing south, imagine you asking someone to open it Kaddish I Once after she died I stood at the edge of her kitchen and she moved me, made me move my legs to cross it one more time, then my mother was gone forever. I can still feel my legs moving, not of their own volition. II After my father died, the warmth of his hand in mine, I sat beside him for a long while, just sat there, and it was enough. Orphaned, I shook hands with the stranger I had become, and so prepared myself for the rest of my life. III In the beginning the Word became flesh. Now only words remain. I imagine their souls as I search to name the faces of memory, to illumine the language of my dead.