For Father’s Day

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.  Pencils

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.