New York City, January 2018. Source: Olimpia Mosteanu
There is this space
I enter
with imagined warmth,
Chet Baker, and the oval face of my father
as the trumpet whimpers
(I’m listening to ‘every time we say goodbye’
and there are hands playing the piano too)
I think of my father’s rough wefts
Some think taking care of rabbits
is easy work, he knows better and I do it too
knowing the wefts and the tears he gets cutting
their throats to celebrate
my coming home. Even home
I remain somewhere else
away from the wefts, his rabbits
The rabbits themselves
have become too small for his sadness
they’ve been replaced by white, furry goats. I see again his sadness
in the hands of the man squeezing a sound
thru this trumpet. There is this place
where the hands’ warmth takes me
a place where I touch the goats
a place wrapped around time, inside words
along his hands
Hands with calluses
that don’t speak evil & don’t dream with words
hug at a distance
and embrace it
My father’s hands know I am here
without rabbits and wefts
his hands know I’m there-as-here
as I listen to this trumpet sound
as I look at Chet Baker’s angular face
It doesn’t resemble my father’s
but it reminds me of his longing
A longing to be past,
to have sighed of relief and the pleasure to have been
there, in it.
Note: I read this poem at the Brooklyn Poets meeting in October 2018, you can listen to the recording between 49:00 and 52:40: