Bryan D. Dietrich

I imagine my father’s death. It is bigger than a breadbox. It is bigger than a Ford Escort, than a Zeppelin, black and vast and slow moving, oozing over an Oklahoma arena. It is bigger than any arena, than Oklahoma. My father’s death is bigger than a planet, bigger than the gravity wells worlds make, that stars stir up after implosion. It is bigger than all the stars. It takes up all space, all dimension, all that is or ever was. It hates everything it isn’t. It makes new space, new matter from all it is. My father’s death takes on form and void and says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. It says, “Let there be worlds.” And there are worlds. It says, “Let there be a garden and a man in it.” And there is a man. The man is my father. He looks around, marveling at this thing his death has made, then sets out to find someone, anyone, with whom to share it.

The mask? Because we were never ugly enough. Because our ugliness was epic. Because we were given to it, because we were so misgiven. You wear one. I wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten. Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico the living wear them, not to scare the dead away, but as invitation. They leave candy on the mounds of those they mourn. New Orleans? Women wear them in order to bare everything else. Men wear them in order to watch. I can remember, back before it all grows grim, making one out of the news, trying to paste it together. I remember my mother helping me. I don’t really remember my father. Something like a face, like the man in the moon. I understand we’re hardwired this way, to make faces before anything else. It’s why we see the Madonna in mold, alien architecture in Martian crater creep. We keep looking for those first faces, first familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one hundred seventy centuries gone. They call him Sorcerer. They call me Knight. We have always lived in the dark.