"Last Testament" by Lory Bedikian
Last Testament
It’s not that you had no will drawn up,
no money left or home paid off for mother,
no life insurance or expensive cars, boats,
no stocks and bonds, buried treasure,
a last-minute savings fund in my name alone,
oh, Dad, it’s that it took you five years to go,
the same amount of time it took the boys to grow,
and while they learned to write one letter at a time,
you could not write the letters as well anymore
and what I looked for was not that earthly wealth
(lord knows it would have definitely, for us both, helped),
but I searched for that final note. I hoped to open it
your handwriting a faded telegram, a cuneiform
of unsaid love, some sort of soliloquy within which
finally, the surprise, an element that proved we did
not really know you, something we almost hoped for,
to discover your passion had been professional
hockey, or if only you had become a paleontologist
because back in the old country or old countries —
you never really had one homeland — you could have
worked and saved and been slave to no system.
Fine. It didn’t have to be a letter. Perhaps you could have
left your nametags from the departments stores,
their worn edges from tossing them on the console
by the evening door, after punching out one more time.
I didn’t want so much mystery. I needed something left
behind besides your face which surfaces now and then
in Jackie Gleason’s ridiculous rants, in the stained glass
of the chapel where a butterfly would not leave me alone.
I wanted more than a note, I wanted to know, to know
if you wanted to stay with us, or finally, willingly, go.
Lory Bedikian
Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting was awarded the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (2010). She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the California Writers Exchange Award (2010). Her work was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015). She was chosen as a finalist in the AROHO Orlando Competition (2015). Her newer work has been published in Miramar Magazine, has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the "Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" series, is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House, and appears in a recent issue of The Los Angeles Review.
Headshot: William Archila
Photo Credit: Staff