preterition

my father’s last tax year

ran a few weeks.

january, 2020.

I know how to file that.

there’s a box for it.

.

he left before the year

turned into the year —

before the masks, before ‘six feet,’

the grocery shelves picked to bone.

he never said zoom

and meant a meeting.

never heard “unprecedented”

used up like a paper towel.

so the ledger splits here:

there is a b e f o r e

and he is posted to it,

along with the chrome on the fender, the charcoal,

a grilled pork chop I have not been able

to match

with any pork chop since,

a brisket that took all night

because some things are supposed to.

a love for my mother

like a shift he never meant to clock out of.

he worked until a week before he left us.

of course he did.

cancer had to come take him

off the schedule itself.

and I’m over here in the after,

pointing a camera at old cars —

fenders, tailfins,

whatever the light is doing to the chrome —

Trying to capture anything 

when mostly it’s just me

holding something up for him to see.

the revenue code says a dead man’s unused losses

don’t carry forward.

they expire with the final return.

the code has never been

anybody’s son.

I’ve got a ten-dollar word for the title

and nothing

for the smell of that smoke.

he’d be seventy-nine today.

that’s the only math that balances.

somewhere in the before

the coals are going gray at the edges,

just right,

and he hasn’t turned around yet.