Chalk
It seems that somehow you are gone
and yet I see the outline drawn
of your presence, a rough shape
where your body then was warm:
in my bed, my house, my arms.
Vapor now where flesh filled space
Dematerialized, no trace
except in some reflected light
a shallow print of your aspect
where you once breathed, moved, slept.
Gone: eyelash, hair, fingernails
and fainter telling small details
What’s left: blunt contour of a corpse
clumsily echoed muscle, bone --
a shadowed edge, the substance gone.
Oh, I can look for evidence
in weather, tea leaves, hope’s pretense
in ragged line on asphalt night
in faded, smeared remembered pain
to be dissolved in time by rain.
My Father Saw a Badger
He sits in silence for
thirty minutes, lost in
internal wandering,
notices a key to
memory’s cupboard.
Reaches, drops it,
seizes it again.
My father took me along
to deliver a wagonload of
hay.
We rode home in cold
breath silence,
on the bumpy wooden bench
seat.
He slowed the horses,
quietly said:
“Jim, look there.”
He pointed outward
slowly,
not enough to signal
the horses to turn.
In the bank across the
creek,
a badger,
furiously scooping
through mud.
My father’s eyes, so often
focused inward now, shine --
again the five-year-old boy
leaning into his father’s
side, the rough jacket, the
smell of pipe smoke and
whiskers and air, scent of
the shallow water, the
endless stubbled acres,
the fierce furry digging into
thick dark mud.
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