Because we all want to write more poems.
Ed
I thought of him today
for the first time in a long time:
an old man’s face reminded me.
The man lacks those baby-blues
but something about him
was similar enough.
Or is it the power of anniversary?
(he’s gone 16 years this month)
Not the arbitration of calendars
but the palpable cycles of things—
Earth in orbit, seasons’ concatenation,
tides in blood and the deep soil of memory.
In many of my dreams
my father, too, is a regular visitor.
Gone over eight years,
he wanders in and out of my sleeping stories
with banal routine,
his presence unremarkable.
How odd this seems on waking—
were I to see him then,
how differently I’d feel!
I suppose the dead don’t leave;
they change rhythm, frequency
like a zoetrope spun too slow or fast
or a Dopplered train whistle;
we lose sight of them
do not hear them speak
not because they’re “gone”
but because we forget
there is more than one way of seeing,
more to hearing than our ears.
- Benjamin Gorman's Shared Poems
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