There’s nothing here that hasn’t happened before,
my father tells me, his voice crackling on the phone.
What he means is he is close to that other side,
the after we know nothing about.
What he means is the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
This summer, he tells me, I’m going to spend
more time out on the patio. I don’t care
if it’s another cool summer. I think it might be possible.
Nothing new about it at all. He says it again. Sighs.
I just want to go home. I just want to love your mother.
I picture him so clearly—
the thick calves, the broad back, the arms and hands
with he-man muscles. The man who built cabinets, laid bricks,
drove medics in the Philippines. Who did everything, anything,
for us. Whatever it took. Now he’s happy imagining
a garden of tomato plants and cucumbers,
watching today’s ballgame, eating the fresh honeydew
melon they give him for breakfast,
each day determined. When I hear him getting tired,
I want to carry him back home, like he used to carry me
from the car to the house, all those times I pretended
I was asleep and he never let on that he knew I wasn’t.