Ashes Among the Remains - Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Ashes Among the Remains

My father responded
Just throw them away
I did not nor did I cast them into
ocean or bay where we’d fished
flounder and fluke nor strew them
over the golf courses where he’d hit
multistage rockets rising from half an inch 
then to a foot above fairways 
to summarily explode
hundreds of yards into the future
other worldly fireworks released 
by his elegantly compact fury.
Instead I left them in their box
a golden shiny tin ossuary
next to my mother’s on the top shelf 
of my bedroom closet
where I did not have to make decisions
and I incidentally could visit them daily
until our house burned down
in the California wildfires
October Ninth 2017
I don’t intend here to dwell upon
the nightmare that fire is 
I will not detail the feelings we had
as we evacuated in one of our cars
along with the family terrier and nothing else 
though later we did contemplate 
Dad’s and Mom’s remains further
consumed by 1500 degree flames
extending their years-earlier incineration
in an oven at the crematorium near Petaluma.
Were it not that my parents lived well into
their nineties I so sick depressed and barely 74
might feel prepared to let go of the tangible rim 
to the bottomless jar of all that remains
to the what or the where or the not.

	- Ed Coletti
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