for my father
The screen of the porch door whitens with a wash of brine.
Beyond the house, afternoon angles into the garden greens,
Exposes the sycamore’s viscous blue risen veins.
On the windowsill inside, where you traced the sun’s design
As it flowed through a hole in the center of a playing card
Flush on the window, the two elliptical circles it made
Reduced the year to one comprehensible size,
Which is all that’s left of you in this inability of mine
To remember your life among the presence of other men,
When I hide the memory of you under horizonless skies;
Or when I try to remember how you looked on that afternoon,
Years ago, that look in your worn eyes as you tried to define
The world by cradling the petal of a pink wild rose
In your palm: all I can see in my mind is the hard
Flesh of your hands and my flesh when I was a child,
Blushed as the rose, aching to reach up and to grasp on
With the instinctive demands of a child for those
Moments when two bodies are circles of light made whole,
Intersticed with light’s slow thick cyclical flow.
Now I move through this house, through all its open doors,
Through a late light that holds the dark floors, until
Under the mirror above the table in the front hall,
I find the keys on the old keychain that you used
When you came here to watch the waves rise and fall
Like the belly of a woman in the water’s wash and swell.
I finger the chain’s little silver balls,
Go again to the porch to stand on the weathered boards
That overhang lengths of seaweed that lie limp and brown
On flanks of sand and watch the sun in one ethereal throb
Deliver itself of its sulphurous afternoon,
A bulge of black horizon disgorge a glimmering new moon.