A Different Law   BRUCE MacKINNON   My father never wept, or I never saw him, not through the long months that the cancer chipped away, finally cut him down to marble, to a white, blue-veined man lying in bed, glowing with light. Not in all the days that contained, continued into nights, when he walked through the rooms of our house as if he couldn't decide, couldn't make up his mind about something, settling for a few moments in a living room chair, thinking better of it, running the water for a bath. The house dimmed to a murmur, a low current of sleeping bodies, through the hours given over to owls, moths, hours that for a time nearly cease being hours, bending like light around the far corners, looking for a different law. I close my eyes and see him lying on his back in the ocean, face and feet pointing up to blue nothing, and I wonder about the body's affinity for salt, how it lies there in the displacement, in the womb, dreaming of the great land bridge, and before, when the continents were one, before marshland turned to Sahara, and now bones of the first giants awaken, protrude five hundred miles from any road, and Titans become whales, then men, then one man, there in the cool water, unable to sleep. Bruce MacKinnon's poems have appeared most recently in Hayden's Ferry Review and The Sewanee Review. His manuscript, Mystery Schools, was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and The National Poetry Series Competition. He teaches creative writing at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. TLR Web home page