Huitzilopochtli watches his twin carry father’s ashes

My father,

who didn’t live to see the apocalypse

is resting now

on the sun deck of a silver yacht

named Zen Master Echu. 

It is the evening

following his internment,

and in the land of the dead

he’ll eat the sweat

ripe flesh of a grapes grown

on Andean foothills.  He’ll swim

for a while in a clear green lagoon

that looks like somewhere

in Puerto Rico.  They say my mother

will be waiting in a hotel room

overlooking the Atlantic

where souls go sailing by

in the clear air like clear sails.

And he will have choices:

no longer existing in air, or for sunshine,

he’ll listen to the great ghost band

his father commands in one corner of the graveyard—

You see, the land of the dead

reverberates with the strained music

filtered from human memory,

scraped from hands that once held

babies, joints, and saxophones.