The Afternoon
You were sitting on the sofa, alone,
in uniform, leaning forward, forearms
resting on your thighs, the cap in your hands--
as I remember it--and looking straight
at me across the small living room space,
which seemed a great distance; and I at you
from behind my mother’s skirts--was I four?
"David, this is your father," she announced,
her voice above me like the calming waters.
But, half-hidden or not, I was not calm.
There was confusion and strangeness in me.
How had you gotten there? you who had been
not anywhere I knew of, but now were...
for an afternoon hour, which disappeared
so deeply into the darkness of time
that I can be sure now of none of it.
For that seems as far as the story goes,
though there are other stories absence tells.
Yet is it not unimaginable
that the hour passed without words, without touch?
At best then, what might be remembered is
the lasting silence of a young soldier’s smile,
and I cannot say whether it was kind.
But I’m sure I’ve had dreams in which I crossed
from my mother to you and perhaps stuck
out my hand for you to shake and told you
little stories from books I could not read
that year and maybe something of how good
I was at hide-and-seek and maybe you
said you were good at it too. But that is
no more than a child’s conjuring in dreams
for things where nothing lived day after day.
When was it I dismissed the afternoon,
reducing the visit image by image
like a child at the seashore spading holes
in wet sand, watching the water well up
and fill in each vacancy with a small
copying of the sea? (What delight then
in that faithful mystery: how it came
into the work every time it was asked!)
And how many seaside afternoons were
required till every trace of you was water,
a thought washed away into everywhere?
Or when was it I invented all this,
forming your appearance out of vague myths
I’d gathered yet soon returned to the mists?
How could such a swift ephemerality,
so doubtful a thing, have served a boy’s mind--
or mine now? Because if it is still there--
and it is--still a fiction of the mind,
neither discredited, confirmed, nor gone,
but some favored notion that can be fetched up
and puzzled over, cherished and put back--
not unlike a child’s keepsake secreted
in the hollow of a tree long ago
for the purpose of saving what perished
but which has become the child’s last instruction:
then...then what a poor student I have been,
for I see only now the young man sitting
in his uneasiness on a worn sofa,
surrounded by the staled air of afternoon,
his innocence a small imprisoned light
as lost in the roil of his life as the two
who will live with all the years of his death.
David Cummings