I’m in my office which was recently your bedroom reading
Donald Hall’s White Apples and the Taste of Stone, and I
am surprised to find your name (in this case a reference
to a horse), but there you are- my son, a young man out
making his way, never near enough, but a welcome visitor.
I struggle to put into words what I mean here, which is
precisely the point. Does it make sense that I carry
a long story, imageless, that only grows in its untelling?
A mute space growing outwardly. A ticking pause.
It’s easy to write a poem about the girls because
the contrast between us is more immediate. I stumble
across them. I can place them in a setting. I see them
and I say, “Look. There they are- not me. This is what
I think of the spaces they are filling.” Our connections
snap into place. I know where I am relative to them.
Writing about you is staring into a mirror, and at first,
seeing nothing, not because of your absence, but
because of the functional blindness of an over-familiar
story I’ve internalized. The experience of arriving home
but not remembering the drive. The unconscious chewing
of a pencil. But then, also the knowledge that this
blindspot has substance. It is something to grasp, peel away.
I suppose I am describing the infinite chain of other
worlds that are lined up, mirror to mirror, father to son,
man to man. Separate but the same. Yours, mine, my
father’s, one day your son’s perhaps. Each of us
standing opposite one another, looking through
an unnecessary string of closed windows. Glass
to tap on but not breach. A vacuum of words stretching.
And I remember a letter my father wrote to me
when he dropped me off at college. He hoped
that we would stay close, that we would write letters
to one another, a final reaching through the glass. Now
I wish I had kept that letter like an artifact upon which
were written the words I have forgotten how to express.
I know I could have used them as we dropped you
off at Florida State. I remember that morning that felt
as if we were setting you adrift. Could any words have been
enough to leave the door between our worlds propped open?
What vocabulary could I have passed to you, what Rosetta Stone?
What space could I create for the two of us that could
ever contain us both? That could accommodate all that goes unsaid?
Most days I carry this shapeless thought in my mind
like an assumption. Of course, this is who we are.
Time passes because it does. We live our own lives and love
as people love. But then, I see you in a poem and you
are eight or nine, skinny like I used to be, we lie
side by side in the grass on a warm day in the park and laugh
and this is everything that I could never say.
No comments:
Post a Comment