Poetry By Elizabeth Cranford Garcia

         Nicholas_T CC




At the funeral of a semi-distant relative

I am thinking of my own father
at the end of the pew, his hair
a great white ocean wave,
like winter itself. When the wind blows,

it lifts like a great wing, and flattens
when he sleeps, into cirrus clouds,
the view he sees looking into 
his past. When we ask,

he pauses each time to see
if something will surface
like a dorsal fin, a fluke,
some sea spray hint of animal life,

then sighs— “three weeks
is about all my memory is good for.”
And I wonder which memories I’ll cling to
and which I’ll let go of when he’s gone,

why his absence might somehow
make it easier to choose—as if letting go
is a matter of will power
when the memories cling to you 

like burrs. I want to say I will miss 
my father the way, in winter, you miss 
the warmth of the sun 
until you are stifling in August’s 

thick cotton. Is it love to worship 
what someone never was, to burnish
their soot back to silver, like Aunt Blanche’s
best tureen, it’s bowl reflecting

some image of yourself you wouldn’t mind 
inheriting? Is there some nagging part of him
that knows the hours he’s spent 
tending every twig of the family tree

may not offset his younger self— 
the explosions of ceramic, the sudden
absences, the air for days 
serrated with ice?

If only the days we adored him
could claim us with the same
blue intensity: hot afternoons 
at the weedy racquetball court,

and cool gas-station slushies.
Windswept motorcycle rides,
clinging to his back. Wrestling matches 
on the living room floor. The nights

he’d invite us all to lie there in the dark
and watch the thunderstorm, 
to stare down the face of our fear
and name it, find that counting out 

its beats was a familiar kind 
of survival, that so much panoply
was merely a matter of music,
of distance, a way to learn

what resurrection must look like,
how lightning’s bright erasures
can bring you to the brink, and allow you, 
again and again, to start over.




​Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s work has or will soon appear in journals such as Tar River Poetry, CALYX, Dialogist, SoFloPoJo, Mom Egg Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and SWWIM, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Stunt Double, was published in 2016 through Finishing Line Press. She is the current Poetry Editor for Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, a Georgia native and mother of three.
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