Running like a Woman with Her Hair on Fire

WITH THE KOI

50 WITHTHE KOI For my Father In the long afternoons I sometimes dream of you, Dad, so tall-a child’s lie-rattling the pages of your newspaper. Your glasses glint, your eyes strain white, then I wake. You did not know, that morning, how the students were cleaning the Koi pond and found at the bottom what looked like a human hand.They walked down with buckets and brushes and fine clean intentions to drain the Koi pond and scrub its sides. That’s when they found it; just after the pond was drained, the Koi afraid. In the evening, the nurse called to say, “Hurry,your father is dying.” And I began to move like Esther Williams in a water ballet, like a piscean ballerina— selfish and keen and beautiful in my reluctance. One student 51 laughed; another, they say vomited, but the one who fished it out, a tinyVietnamese girl studying civil Engineering, only pursed her lips and sniffed and suggested they get on with it. I’m grateful, Dad, that you were not Catholic, had a priest been there, I swear I would have cried to offer him the usual thing. Instead, I touched your dry hand, stood a while to harbor…something for your emptied self. ...