Having failed to see the thing in flight, and talk failing,
           there being no solace
in knowing details—the clean snap of one wing, the plunge—
           I saw instead what was left,
riding at 14 to a crash site, certain
           imagination must
be worse than truth. We stood among the smattering
           of what remained: splinters
of instrument and frame, a seatbelt clasp, a piece
           of helmet; his pilot friends—
all fathers, my father—blanched in the sun, toeing,
           toeing the gravel, turning
circles over the blasted earth; the pilgrimage
           each made but never talked
about, the funeral not ritual enough;
           an absence that wasn’t, then was;
a sawgrass-covered hole we couldn’t find now with a map.