In different dreams,
my father visits me in the house I live in now;
wearing his dead-man’s shoes, he comes like Leviathan,
bigger than my memory of him, to meet me in imagined rooms.
We are now of an age
where a friendship of equals and grizzled heads
might nurture itself; we speak of the sons we had been,
the fathers we once were and the grandfathers we became at last.
Memory wakes in me, as deep as rock where the strata
dive to the centre of the earth, deeper than the ocean
where my father swims, remembered, in the waves,
where, on the dry land of his youth, he ploughs his furrow.
I know he walks with the old gods, his quiet warrior unleashed
by wind and season to make his way to this dream where
I meet him unrestrained, lifted out of the sweep of time,
set free, with his face as it had always been.
End of the year memory. My father comes into my dreams often even though we are now the same age reckoned by lived years. This imagining reached toward the difference memory makes to the things and people we knew. We change and they change with us. Else, in the strange ether of some hereafter their change is profound and mysterious. Across everything, it inserts its peculiar quantum hand inside our entangled hearts to bring us with them.
my father visits me in the house I live in now;
wearing his dead-man’s shoes, he comes like Leviathan,
bigger than my memory of him, to meet me in imagined rooms.
We are now of an age
where a friendship of equals and grizzled heads
might nurture itself; we speak of the sons we had been,
the fathers we once were and the grandfathers we became at last.
Memory wakes in me, as deep as rock where the strata
dive to the centre of the earth, deeper than the ocean
where my father swims, remembered, in the waves,
where, on the dry land of his youth, he ploughs his furrow.
I know he walks with the old gods, his quiet warrior unleashed
by wind and season to make his way to this dream where
I meet him unrestrained, lifted out of the sweep of time,
set free, with his face as it had always been.
© BH, 2022
End of the year memory. My father comes into my dreams often even though we are now the same age reckoned by lived years. This imagining reached toward the difference memory makes to the things and people we knew. We change and they change with us. Else, in the strange ether of some hereafter their change is profound and mysterious. Across everything, it inserts its peculiar quantum hand inside our entangled hearts to bring us with them.
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