Matthew Nadelson teaches writing at Norco College and leads a creative writing workshop at the Corona Public Library through the Inlandia Institute. His writing has been featured in more than 20 journals and anthologies, and he was recently featured on the Moon Tide Press website as their "Poet of the Month" for December 2013. His first poetry collection, American Spirit, was published in August 2011 by Finishing Line Press. The music for "Stars Will Fade" was composed and recorded by Justin Dennison. The lyrics for the song were written and sung by Matthew Nadelson. ---------
"Stars Will Fade," by Matthew Nadelson from Connotation Press .
To My Father on the Death of His Father
You told me you could barely remember him
holding you as a child, so I can only imagine
you cradling, in the crescent of your arm,
your father’s head, bald and dimpled
as the golf balls he fetched from the river
that ran through the golf course he worked in
as a child. You held his limp body.
IV’s wormed their way through his veins.
Hooked to the gills like a fish caught
between two worlds, he gasped for breath,
grasping for something eternal.
“The God of Abraham will cradle you
as a child,” you whispered, as his heart
slowed to a whisper, and his lungs expired.
“In a field of wild azaleas, at the fulcrum of the ridge
dividing the Hudson and Housatonic watersheds,”
under a cherry tree, I think your brother said
before he too died, you buried your father’s remains—
8 pounds of ash and bone, already taking root
beneath the green grass of the country club
at which you said he worked his youth
away, mowing the golf course to a tee,
years lost with every fistful of ash tossed
through the cherry tree bending with the wind
as if shaking its branches at heaven,
contorted into a question mark
at the end of a life sentence.
That evening, you floated along
the Housatonic in a rented boat, not altogether
unlike the soul-laden body adrift
through any night’s cold, dark, indifferent air,
knowing we’re all born under one roof— this sky;
we all shoulder the same clouds.
The morning sky is a blank sheet
spreading out before me,
lacking stars and infinitely
wide and deep as the sea.
I look up past the blue beyond
to God, who is everywhere
but here. The austere trees hold up the sky,
but death is all that shadows us.