Lapis Lazuli
- Lapis Lazuli
Somewhere beyond these clouds my final day prepares itself. Right now, it’s warm and fair— this minute is, staring at heaven’s face, knowing both face and heaven constructions, language creating space where I can pray, this minute I will call “lapis lazuli,” Yeats’s Chinamen twinkling their eyes out there in place of clouds, evoked by just my words.
My father’s last day, when he rose to it three years ago—he told me it was “nice,” nice weather (I was calling every day since Mother’s death just to check up on him). “Nice” meant the Michigan December cold gave him a sky outside the nursing home where he could watch a day compose, dissolve.
When I called back at dinner he was gone, the ambulance had come midafternoon. The doctor phoned at midnight with the news: he might not make it. The doctor woke me at two. [End Page 647]
Peter Cooley’s ninth book, Night Bus to the Afterlife, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. The recipient of an ATLAS grant from the state of Louisiana to work on the book “Aftermaths: Louisiana After Hurricane Katrina,” he also received the Marble Faun Prize in poetry from the Faulkner Society for a selection from that manuscript.
