As I enter the morgue, my heart is crushed
between denial and belief. Something in me
speaks that you are not him, the corpse,
though this means searching countless hours more
in the catalogue of the nameless dead.
The door swings shut behind me, ominous
and final, and when my eyes fall flat on the skin,
bleached by the river, I withdraw
and almost faint. Who is this person blunt
and shapeless in this disinfected light, I ask.
Stripped of all marks of identification
as though it were possible to turn someone
into a complete stranger, the body begs
to be known and released. Assessing the features,
deliberately as I would my child’s sleep,
I grow into remembrance: the white polo
and its unmistakable pocket’s margin, the eyes
irreparably swollen and shut forever. And the shoes.
We bought those shoes together, in a mall,
Doc Martens with its trademark soles
which you liked beyond words. I felt the years
rush past behind us, in that moment when we admired
the stitches and leather, keeping just the both of us:
father and son, named even just for that instance.
The whiteness hurts my vision and the walls
collapse on my grief. Will you go far with
the memory of departure, there beyond the line
you can no longer cross, as you try to reach us—
your family on the opposite side—speechless
and barefoot, staggering with every assault of sorrow?
