My father, in the present tense

I think about my father’s eulogy as often as I think about my own,
which is to say: always and never.

My father is 60, and healthy,
and he stands outside the door of our old Blacksburg apartment,
the one we drove past twice today before
we found ourselves again,
saplings grown tall,
the plain brick mailroom dragging 1990 into now.
He walks me forward-backward from pool to stairwell to balcony,
navigating the memory, his words furnishing
the world I will inherit.

I have pigeonholed my father before.
I will do it again.
But not when we squint through the plastic blinds together,
outside and inside the smudged glass window,
reconjuring the missing sofa, reinviting absent guests.
We chase our ghosts along footpaths and hallways,
counting stairs, one giant’s step after another,
winding skyward, air thinning at the summit,
old growth in all directions.
The gaps in the guardrails are almost wide enough
for a child to slip through, if no one is watching,
if no one is holding you tight, but

he will hold my hand until the fever breaks.
He will hold my hand until we are each of us a foreign language,
until we are each of us a dead one,
until every lesson is lost,
until the congregation stops speaking.

Started sometime in 2024
Finished June 18, 2025, a few days after Father’s Day