My Book Had Come Undone

because I’d deemed the book complete, the last pages written, end notes done. Because the pages seemed armored against me. Needful of nothing. Smug. Because a day passed. Because I got a call; a heart had faltered. The person the protagonist was drawn on: gone. Because it was my father. Because was. Because my father is, in the book, alive. Because alive now seems a lie. Death, the missing letter. Because his heart pumps through the pages’ veins, through trees felled for their pulp. Because art can’t match life’s stride, or death’s. Because my book has shorter legs. Because it lags like a video streamed on unstable internet. Because I couldn’t finish the bowl of chicken soup I’d started before the call. Because my father’s flesh was warm when I heated the broth. Because I thought of the chicken my father saw as a pet, as a child. Because he learned it wasn’t. Because he ate it, learned, then cried. Because I need to edit. Because death is absent, but death is the absence that can’t be revised.