A Veteran

My father came down not killed from among others, killers or killed, for whom he'd worn a uniform, and he lived a long afterward, a steady man on the flattest of plains. I called after him many times, surprised when I heard the catch in my own voice. He didn't know how to find the solace of listening to someone else speak of what he'd seen and survived. He himself closed his own mouth against his own words. In the wrong sequence, his spirit, then his mind, and last his body crossed over that infamous, peat-inky, metaphorical water that has no far shore. I think he was carried like a leaf in currents so gentle that a duckling, had it been alive, could have braved them, but too strong for a leaf. And saturated with minerals that steadily replaced organic cells, the water turned my father, an ex-soldier, to leaf-delicate stone inscribed with the axioms of countless veins.