04-13-2011, 12:53 PM
Your face in the centre of the gold pasta frame,
like a fish staring with its dead yellow eye
at the unknown diner. In the background branches
cast shadows on a fence, and you, leaning back,
hold a puppy I don’t remember
against the front of your brown coat,
thick despite the clear blue skies.
A ragged mop of bright blonde wheat
crowns a cliff pitted with caves.
Why do I feel that if someone touched you
at the moment when the shutter clicked
you would have expelled a layer of dust?
I love you. You never knew that, but I do.
I didn’t cry at your funeral, to which I wore
faded blue jeans, but still, I love you.
I didn’t say it as you wept against my knee
that awkward night, when the stars were
too close to the earth, and their heat singed my skin,
but despite our distance I love you.
You leave me now with young siblings,
and a father who still somehow survives.
Picturing your face alongside my mother’s, my own,
so many, so many...
I had not thought death had undone so many.
***
The last line is taken from L63 of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, which was itself paraphrased from this line in Dante’s “Inferno”, “Canto III: The Gate of Hell”: “...behind it came so long a train of folk, that I could never have believed death had undone so many.”
like a fish staring with its dead yellow eye
at the unknown diner. In the background branches
cast shadows on a fence, and you, leaning back,
hold a puppy I don’t remember
against the front of your brown coat,
thick despite the clear blue skies.
A ragged mop of bright blonde wheat
crowns a cliff pitted with caves.
Why do I feel that if someone touched you
at the moment when the shutter clicked
you would have expelled a layer of dust?
I love you. You never knew that, but I do.
I didn’t cry at your funeral, to which I wore
faded blue jeans, but still, I love you.
I didn’t say it as you wept against my knee
that awkward night, when the stars were
too close to the earth, and their heat singed my skin,
but despite our distance I love you.
You leave me now with young siblings,
and a father who still somehow survives.
Picturing your face alongside my mother’s, my own,
so many, so many...
I had not thought death had undone so many.
***
The last line is taken from L63 of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, which was itself paraphrased from this line in Dante’s “Inferno”, “Canto III: The Gate of Hell”: “...behind it came so long a train of folk, that I could never have believed death had undone so many.”
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe