For Father’s Day
by Jamison Koehler on June 20, 2010
As regular readers of this blog know, I look for any excuse to post a poem by my father. Here is one he wrote for his own father, a poem that has influenced everything I have ever written. I reprint it now with his permission.
Your desk, by the window
Sitting at your desk, I open
one drawer, then
another. Pencil
rattle lightly,
lie awry. I mean to look
but cannot seem to think,
or take, or touch things.
In the middle drawer
these envelopes,
unused; letters
you did not write.
Their whiteness is
the distance now between us;
differences;
so many ways to fail.
Whenever we said goodbye
it was like this.
Though minutes move
unmeasured toward their end,
you feel,
in the pulse, the dark begin.
I push the drawer in
and hear
the stillness, there — outside,
the water nearing shore.
Your father is a lucky man
Beautiful.