Chicken Salad

Three hours before he died,
my father felt he should have an answer
when I asked what he might like to eat.
He remembered a kind of chicken salad he liked
weeks ago when living was more possible
and he said, “Maybe that chicken salad”
but because of the blood in his mouth
and because of his shortness of breath
he had to say it several times before I understood.
So I went out and bought a container of chicken salad,
grateful for the illusion of helping,
but when I brought it back to the apartment
my father studied it for thirty seconds
and set it aside on the bed. I wasn’t ready
to know what the eyes of the nurse at the hospice
had tried to tell me before dawn, so I said,
“Don’t you want your chicken salad, Daddy?”
He glanced at it from a distance of many miles—
little tub of chicken salad down on the planet of
slaughtered birds and mastication, digestion, excretion—
and murmured, “Maybe later.” He was in
the final austerity
which I was too frazzled to quite recognize
but ever since his death I see with stony clarity
the solitary dignity of
the totality of his knowing
now far beyond the pleasure of chicken salad
he had gone already and would go.

Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. He has published four books of poems, most recently JAB (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

“Chicken Salad” appears in our Winter 2007 issue.