Not the Almost-Right Word

A friend tells me he was holding 

his mother’s hand as she lay dying.

At the end, her final words were,

“I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.” 

“Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him” 

or “we’ll be together again”

but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing 

that language almost means

then frightens us when it doesn’t—

love, we say, God, we write, 

and the words fall short. We dream 

of  lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,

a word is worth a thousand pictures.

What you say doesn’t have to be true.

It only has to be imaginable. 

Where is my friend’s father? 

In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say,

or sorting nails in the workshop. 

Or in the yard, unlearning 

the constellations so he can see the stars.