Sundown
by Maja Lukic
I stay back alone in my dead father鈥檚 apartment, and everything
is replete with the past鈥攎y mother鈥檚 handwriting, expired passports,
folded linens, yellowed curtains, various human stains,
my brother鈥檚 cigarette smoke. My face in the mirror startles鈥�
red welt of lipstick, thin shoulders. Behind me, the sun is losing
its hold on the city. If they are so dead, how can I be sure I鈥檓 alive?
From the balcony, I watch the sunset bleed over the escarpment.
I wonder how often he sat out here with a beer bottle, sweat beading
along his temples, watching the sun die out鈥攆irst with my mother, then alone.
I never felt at home here. I think of him shuffling around the kitchen,
making simple meals, watching tennis. This is how he lived in the end,
in shadowy rooms, the sun going down鈥攖his is how he died, the sun
going down. I want a cigarette. I want a drink. I鈥檓 as close to his final
nights as I will ever be. And the thought of it arrows. I want my dead back.
I walk into my father鈥檚 room, its single blood stain darkening.
The genesis of this poem is clear and painful. I wrote it while emptying out my father鈥檚 apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, in October 2023. My father had died there accidentally in the spring. It was my first time back since his death. Everywhere was evidence of a life arrested鈥攂roken eggshells, dirty plates, receipts, empty vodka bottles, and a shapeless blood stain where he had fallen, the point at which my father ceased to be my father.
After the first day of work alongside family, I found myself alone. The sun was setting the way it had set for my father in his last months, on the last day of his life. In its undiscerning way, the sun seemed like a hinge鈥攕etting for the living, setting for the dead. When the speaker asks, 鈥淚f they are so dead, how can I be sure I鈥檓 alive?鈥� I mean sincerely to capture the bafflement I felt then. The family I had measured my life against was gone. How could I be sure of anything when my father had died as he lived and lived as he died?
Despite the sharp reason for the poem鈥檚 telling, its arrival into the world as an object has been marked by irresolution and self-interrogation. Structural decisions about the poem鈥檚 shape and form eluded me for a long time as the sheer number of objects and competing impressions made it difficult to focus. Revision and excision are brutal acts in the wake of a death when so much has already been lost. The writing process taunted my own work in the apartment鈥攖hrowing away pieces of the past with no obvious vision of the future.
Organizing the poem鈥檚 movements to the end proved the most challenging. I find it nearly impossible to close elegies these days鈥攕ome part of me feels obligated to impart what I have learned but in poem after poem, I find no answer to the relentless question: what has so much proximity to death taught me? Here, the image of the blood stain slid into the last line of the poem and became the magnet toward which the details of the poem converged. Like the sun, blood struck me as the hinge between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living. Blood seemed like the substance that could cross the threshold to the afterlife. It was simultaneously evidence that he had lived and, as it dried, evidence that he had passed. Formally, it made of the poem a vortex, with the blood stain working as a whirlpool that traps everything in its magnetic pull鈥攖he lines falling toward it, the speaker moving toward it, the sun coming down.
The poem鈥檚 title comes from Gordon Lightfoot鈥檚 famous song 鈥淪undown.鈥� Lightfoot, that Canadian folk legend, had died a week after my father, and I return to Lightfoot鈥檚 songs often now, the soundtrack for a complicated elegy.
is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review,听 Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, The聽 Slowdown podcast, and other places. Lukic is a board member at Four Way聽 Books and a poetry reader at The Swannanoa Review.