MY DAD SPEAKS TO ME THROUGH THE PINE NEEDLE
I FIND IN HIS OLD COPY OF PROUST
by Harvey Lillywhite
The slow owl of my soul had closed his eyes.
It was Dad’s life I lived in, not my own.
Visits court-ordered for every weekend,
Words dwindled to dead batteries; surprise
Dissolved from the hours; and simple darkness
Filled the hollow goblet I drank from then.
With a quick involuntary howl I
Open my eyes and laugh out loud today
When I turn the page in his old hard-back
Proust and find the petrified pine needle
Left to mark his place back five hundred moons;
How fifty years I’ve been pushing him out
Of my body, to rescue him, from hate.
Now, fat old man myself, I understand.
Below the knobbed hoof that hooked this needle
To the tree, the brittle fetlock is wrapped
Still in delicate tissue, hornet’s-nest
Gray, then the graceful seven-inch curve of
Joined legs the f hole in a violin
Makes, down to the pen-point sharp as an owl’s
Beak—quillless pen you could surely write with.
This tweezers, this caliper, this compass
Flashed me back to the sad patio he
Imposed on me: Saturday in Shadows,
Sunday in the Gloom. There he lounged all day
On turquoise and pink nylon straps criss-crossed
On the collapsible aluminum
Frame, a drab green army surplus blanket
Beneath him, the square plastic bolster that
Propped him up, reading his Walton’s Angler,
Reading his way beyond the everything-
Gone-wrong. He feared the complex divinity
Of clutter that life is made of, impure
Completely unsatisfactory stuff.
Today I read the page he marked and go
A page ahead and hear the owl calling
To the moon in the pine and know exactly
How to answer that vanishing question.
No doubt now he’s Piscator in Sussex
Angling with Izaak for Shelsey Cockle.
Maybe now he’s feeding like his trout, clear
And purely in the swiftest streams on the
Hardest gravel spawning in that great autumn.
Perhaps I’m his next life, what he’s becoming.
And far off in the tumble downriver
My sons swim on for the me I’ll never
Know. Wherever he rests, may the linen
Seem pure white and smelling of lavender.