How We Come Clean

the things that make us

4/16/26

How We Come Clean

My father may be dying. Could be dying.

He is eighty-six years old.

We have been talking.

About death,

about the land beneath our feet,

about the sky that curves above us.

On HBO’s The Pitt, they have four things to say to the dying—

“I love you”; “Thank you”; “I forgive you”; “Please forgive me.”

That’s the sum total,

that’s everything.

And the two of us talking about

what will happen to our land.

And all these memories of the land,

the fundamentals of who we really are.

And the tangible love,

like a morning mist moving across the pasture,

so thick is its body, its arms—

the earth has always been a mother to hold us.

When my father dies,

we will have his body burned

and I will stir his ashes together with my mother’s

that have been resting

in a cardboard box

in my father’s kitchen

these last twenty years.

And I will return the two of them to our land.

To the lower pasture just above the wash.

I will scatter them in the place

where my father’s

stillborn sister was buried

inside a ring of fairy stones.

And they will move

with the wind and the rain.

Across our land,

across the ridge,

across the world.

And one day,

some mother’s dusty hands

will hover a moment

before the water

gushes over them.