When Dad wasn't ready to come home yet
I wandered around his office, tapping the glass
To watch the guppies move through the weed
And reading posters about Harvey and Alzheimer,
Cox, Archibald Smith
Then down the silent familiar hall

That smelled like pickles and insecticide
To see the other fishtanks:
The fetus contemplating its umbilicus,
The tapeworm folded over and over
Like an enormous egg noodle,
The cafe coronary trachea
With its bite of steak still lodged

And past the always closed door
Of the room about how and why
This adult male, a brain bleed
That elderly woman,
So many milligrams
Of what sedative
That young girl
Exsanguination
Secondary to shame
Secrets discovered

And kept on file in the quiet
Library down the hall
Bound volumes, final report cards
External genitalia (normal)
Internal organs (weight, appearance)
Blood levels (too high, too low)
Here they sit in dusty green leather
Old and old and young

In my father's office
I look through his microscope
At fields of beautiful blue
And magenta cells
There, see, look at eleven o'clock
Toward the center, the one that's different

The new growth beginning to blossom
The new growth that bloomed in my father
After years of breathing formaldehyde
Years of breathing the secrets
Of cells, of sorrow, of cosmic entropy
He died, and had his body burned
No autopsy, no library

To ashes, to dust, to nothing
Released