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Poetry from The Literary Review
My Father, Dying
T. ALAN BROUGHTON
In the moment when pain ceased,
as darkness more dark than any night you had seen
rolled toward you and you held your breath
as if you might survive some ocean breaker
flinging you high on another shore,
was memory there also?
What came in that stillness
where the dark wave had no sound
and you were no longer breathing, your blood
held perfectly still too in that dark?
When you were a small boy and roamed
beyond your father's fields, a collie
walked with you, nosing the burrows of moles
and groundhogs, flushing birds from their nests.
When you came home from college, you heaved
bails onto wagons, clucked the horses forward,
then slung load after load into ricks
and lofts. When your father died,
you were far from home where the dogs
of Anatolia barked at your figure searching
rocky hills for signs of ancient Rome.
Did a line of dusky trees, grass and sundial
come back to you and also the touch of a hand
in yours, your future wife's, the pale face
she pressed to your collar bone?
Does memory surge at all against
the indifferent silence, black wave that holds
neither pain nor loss of pain, joy nor listless heat
of long afternoons? The body exhales, rough heart
stops beating. We burn what remains
and drop the urn into busy soil.
Old father, does greeny air of new-mown hay,
the dog's cold nose nudging your leg
remain strong enough for one last return?
Will I see you at my end?
Over your ashes I have piled stones.
After a rainfall, under the sun, they gleam.
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