JAMES HOCH

Dust

Mostly skin sloughed and drifting
it lays on books no else wanted,

the silver figure of a laurelled runner,
a typewriter firmly in its black case.

Mostly his skin when we cracked
a closet door—a stack of white shirts

still wrapped in Christmas flake,
and hovering mostly like snow

as we stripped his flowered sheets
and wept and made love and wept.

Mostly with us, something breaking,
our voices mostly now drowsy

as we waltz and sing my father’s
poor out-of-key German

to our sleep-troubled son,
blossom and snow, our lives are light.