Mourner's Litany

the look on my father's face while he waited for a train

or watched my one-year-old climb stairs,

his fat, cracked tongue

and the squeals of disgust and delight emitted by nieces

when it revealed itself over turkey and yams;

the way I sandwich memory of him

between thick leaves of wailing jazz on scratched LPs,

between the dear, the flawed, the unavoidable,

my father's farm-red house and his pink-slippered wife,