Horoscope for My Dying Father
- Horoscope for My Dying Father
Shortly, you’ll wake into the roomyou woke to over half your life.
The light will inch across the ceilinguntil it meets the wall.
The sheetswill seem softer than you remember.
Your lover will be dreaming stilland you will rise without a sound.
Back to the mirror, you will dressin your finest black attire.
Outside,though we can’t see it in this light,the colossal wheel will still turn.
When, finally, you descend the stairs,the warped risers will not creak.
You’ll pause before the door, unlockit—check the clock. Until then, sleep. [End Page 61]
Michael Shewmaker is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Yale Review, Parnassus, Oxford American, New Criterion, Narrative, Measure, Hopkins Review, Columbia, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
