My Santiago

30 minutes past midnight,

Jerks me out of sleep,

Heart pounding.

I had awoken,

Oddly, just seconds before,

Waiting…

Social calls don’t happen at after midnight.

Premonition of sadness.

Fran takes the call,

On the other end, Nedra!

I sit by Fran’s side,

Reconstructing snatches of conversation

From my wife’s bursts of anguish,

The words etched in my mind – of hers –

“Oh Dad! Oh Dad! Oh Dad!”

Hope refusing to give way to blunt fact.

But even in death,

Life has its quirky moments.

As we book flights, washed clothes,

In that surreal early morning time,

The washing machine blows up,

The phone dies,

Both only fleetingly;

As if Donald,

Ever the fixer of things,