. . . for my father

Several years ago I returned to a childhood park,

and after more than sixty years everything had

changed.  When I was five or six, in a frenzied

half hour, I caught twenty-two fingerling bluegill,

until my father tired of baiting my hook and throwing

them back.  It was a moment of such pure joy and

love that I was never to experience its like again.

Following two-for-one in my father's footsteps,

If this pond had any name I never knew it,

Not then as a child nor now come back to it,

Wishing to be that child again but now it is

Other children who play and plash the water's

Shallows, clearer than I remember it where

Minnows pooled in willow shadows, smaller

In some way that separates me from them

Who have no need of names in their games,

Their voices saying all the water ever said

To me once and now again, how they take

Me unknowing into long moments of lifting

Their laughter across the water and away

In a leaving they have not yet come to know

Nor learned they can never come back to,

Going away now into the dusk, their names

Called, silence settling over the still water.

If only I could have made a poem then of

The word Father so he might have heard

In that moment not only mine but some old

Innocence of his own, some familiar way

Of still calling me home again.  I listen, but

No longer remember the sound of his voice.