This chapbook consists of two parts. The first part is a sequence of 20 poems that describe the final illness and death of the author's father. He is "a man who won't die," a man who has survived the ravages of several chronic illnesses, but who now faces another surgery, "to have the toe / amputated before gangrene set in." Yet the father is finally "slipping / below the horizon." His son sits in the hospital corridor, imbibing the sights and smells of the present, while moving back and forth in his mind between the past and future.

At last his father dies. Life goes on, connection goes on. The author thinks about his son, "my son is lifting the world / on his back . . . " The second part of the chapbook is a long poem called "Kaddesh for My Father," modeled after Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish and written about a year after his father died.