 |
FatherIt is morning my fatherbefore you leave in the gray light to drive the mountain roads. It is this autumn that I remember as you creaked the carpet dressing in the dark until your descent on the worn stairs to the breakfast room still cool above the blue Formica table. The clink of your spoon in the cup as you lit your first cigarette and blew the smoke through your nose is an intimacy, I've grown used to… an image from the lake's surface when you told me to jump into the deep water or that first hunt when I killed the rabbit beside the purple briars after you had walked there to flush it out. This holy incense is what redeems me from the light broken by clouds and that loss that growing brings, when what moves through this privacy is but a shadow sinking through the membrane of memory, a failing at the heart of things to stay. Now, as I watch my son moving through the afternoon, silent and alone disappearing before me, a rustle I listen for in the leaves. It is this wet scent of morning I long for, the road winding through the mountains in that fine gray light. C. Hood Frazier |