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My grandfather uncremates himself onto his bed. Coins leap

from the beggar’s bowl into a passerby’s hand. On the other

 

side of earth, families pour from departure gates, return bodies

to first embraces. The teapot drinks with its snout. One stroke

 

after another, the painter erases their masterpiece. The camera

swallows the Polaroid, the flash. Room blackened to a negative,

 

a man wraps a leather belt round his lover’s waist, its tail

slithering through each loop like an obedient snake. In the novel

 

I am reading, an amnesiac remembers more and more of herself

until she is whole again. I dream of the city where memory is

 

a two-way street, snow rising from asphalt as if summoned

for the rapture, gravity wound backwards like a watch.

 

It is what it is, my father would say. Is it? What is it? I close the book,

hibernate the story. The past is fixed. It doesn’t matter what I do next.