Some people scatter them in places that were special,
the lake where he used to fish, the park bench in the fall,
the ocean off the coast, the high and terrestrial
mountain that he’d hiked before age made it stall.
Some keep them on the mantle in an urn
and talk to them on mornings when the light is right,
some bury them in garden plots to return
to the soil and the growing in the bright.
What we do with the ashes tells you something true
about what we believe the dead will do
with the direction of their departure and their freedom,
whether they need a location or a kingdom
or just the air, what we do with ashes tells the truth.
My father said scatter them at sea, he’d always
loved the water, spent his summers on the bay,
and so we went out on one of those bright days
and opened the container and the gray
and white dispersed and caught the wind and scattered
in a way that was both smaller than expected
and larger, both things that simultaneously mattered
and unmattered, both accepted and rejected.
The ritual of dispersal is its own ceremony,
it takes the fact of ashes and it makes it act,
it doesn’t hold on, it releases what the many
years of being a person had compacted
back into the elements with intention,
with a gesture that says: here, this is where you go,
back to the thing that you loved with all attention
while you were alive, the sea, the rain, the snow.