The Last Day He Was a Young Man
Buttercups posing in dew cascade down a mucky bank at dawn. My father has pointed them out with the tip of his cane pole as we glide by in lemoned light and shifting silences.
He is a man who sees all that moves — even the tender grip of the sun on flowers and the vanishing hand of the moon among the ferns — along these yawning bayou banks.
The pole is a wand in his hand, and it roams in vertiginous loops, as though he might be inscribing the path of the Southern Cross as it cleaved through
