James Prather

On Our Way to the Wake

Granny's Apartment

She called our daughter

to come back home,

arranging flights

and rides at a murmur.

I leaned on the window,

letting thoughts roam

past their light dialectics

to learn a firmer

sorrow from autumn

and its solid ground,

rent by our road

which ran without bend.

Mourning at noon

in a naked sound,

Shucked stalks swayed

in swelling wind.

Memories would remain

murky and half-lit,

like river sediment,

if I sought a reason.

Those grieving fields

must beget and forget

their seedling dead

in a single season.

With the sacrosanct

sense of a game,

We drove and never

spoke his name.

Within my mind’s beloved history

of her, it checkers memories from that time:

the lobby’s spinning doors shutting slowly

and her within, the elevator’s chime,

or Easter ribbons on each hallway door.

She made her peace, amid clean, tempered glass,

with awkward jokes about her corpse’s snore.

For me, she lives with Pops off Meadowgrass

humming through the same neighborhood affairs,

chatting about her friends in their last years.

Her house has kids in couches and armchairs.

Its plaid-wrought permanence dispels the fears

we knew then: that the sun would sink too fast,

that those distracted days wouldn’t last.

James Prather lives with his wife and two children in Houston, Texas, where he teaches literature at the Houston Institute. His writing has appeared most recently in Literary Matters and Ekstasis.