Spry Literary Journal

Prayer for My Father’s Frontal Lobes

Leave him a little, the prelude to night. Leave him

his languages and lonesome embellishments. First name
and leave him a gap to last strip

of being. We redistrict to his small breakings, and he to old
photographs with content. Leave him far more—

the wide anchor of winter, his eye on the flat
of the river. The desert is blooming

its nests and mending. These days I confide
in vague fractions, the durable light.

Leave him the ordinary.
Leave him his storms. Pray away vanishing.

Brian Doty - April 22, 2019

This touched me deeply. In my case it was my Mother. I was unable to have a sensible conversation with her during the last seven years of her life. My Father tended to her alone until he broke.
That too was devastation. They were deeply in love until the end…she knew him even in her illness’s depths.