INTERVALS
i.m. my father
The years had stacked.
The route between two points left him perplexed:
which path was true? Thus at a loss, appalled,
(he'd always liked things neat, exact:
loose pennies rolled
in tidy wrappers, weed-free gardens walled,
addresses Rolodexed,
each day appraised, accounted for, controlled),
last night he thought
he'd catalog his cars and toys. They all
appeared: the old Suburban and of course
the brand-new Buick Skylark bought
in sixty-five,
his Comet sled, his wooden hobby-horse.
But he could not recall
the Saturn Astra parked out in the drive.
He'd tabulate
the names of every person he had met
at every stage along his fourscore life —
the ones he'd loved or chanced to hate —
and he would limn
Brick Bradford in detail, but not his wife,
though he could not forget
the music box she'd purchased on a whim.
Another dawn
has slipped through window blinds to find him still
attempting to remember parables,
a nephew's face, the word chiffon,
the Seven Seas;
to place at last the ordered variables,
those nested n's that fill
the space between his dark parentheses.
YOU ARE READING
Coming to Terms
PoetryThis is my ten-form poetry submission to the first annual ATTYS competition. All ten poems are related to the process of coming to terms with different life situations: a miscarriage, the death of a loved one in the Vietnam war; a political abductio...
