What is it that he must say or must do? He thinks about this without the words, and he does so quite seriously as if he were supposed to listen to someone speaking to him over his shoulder, someone over and above the I-am everyone has at his disposal; that is, rather than he was to have a talk with himself in himself, as he could, you know, do that, talk with himself, in his Self, have an I-to-I with me, as he has done, even talking with his selves, how many of them could he, though, the many selves Self, as he has repeated the times he has thought about these things, who am I, what am I; or what are you, as he asks sometimes in the mirror, that reflection of himself, whichever one it is that shows up there in the mirror, he recalls having read in a poem about how the in of the mirror is really on. There have always been many inside a person, behind a person, we could say, he says. Here and there and everywhere side-by-side inside of him. The I is a plurality, he has said in these words and words revised, off his lips or on the page or in his blog; the ways he speaks about himself, others, a person, a man, a woman, a child, however old or young or arranged or deranged–de-arranged. He now thinks about what he should say that he has not said–and wonders if it is yet . . . what he will say then will have said. He does say what he thinks he should and he is satisfied with that as if he were to find something waiting to be seen inside? outside? among? between? He did not see before–the calendar is not part of remembering. It is not necessarily so that he or anyone must mark the date every year to remember the departed. Remembering happens when it happens–recollecting is something that helps remembering or is the result and thus the after effect of having remembered. That I did recall at all is what matters. The pedantry of counting days or of marking them is not where my heart beats for my father. Notions of time, of infinity, of eternity–I do not look at calendars or watch clocks–I pay more attention to the sun, the moon and constellations passing across the night sky in what I like to call the con-stellar clock. I do not understand throwing out Christmas cards the day one receives them. I have Christmas cards from I cannot say how long ago. Maybe I am full of shit and have a great capacity to rationalize my actions. I do not care to find out or figure out if this is true or not.
The anniversary of his father’s death passed recently without anyone in his home realizing it until nearly a week after. I am still unsure what this proves. I am not so sure that ethics are not anything but situational. It was he who noticed that they had missed it, not marked it, let it pass without noticing; but he also did not say anything to anyone in his home when he did realize. The needs of the living have always taken precedence over attention to the dead, even my father would agree, so in doing the like we honored my dad, or so I say he would have agreed, and how many times have I been surprised by a word or comment by someone I thought I knew as well, or so I believed, as anyone else could?
The Falling Leaf Review 