Sunflower

It stood each summer over my father’s garden,
          his cabbages, his potato drills,
his staked tomatoes, his blushing radishes.
         A sentinel, it watched, a bright and heavy-headed
observer of the seasonal growth of the garden,
         of the garden’s many lives, those of the plants
and that of the planter, my father who never failed
         to wake the garden from its moribund sleep
as he turned the spring-softened earth, cultivated,
         planted, watered and waited, letting summer
entice this little patch of our slumbering yard,
         as Shakespeare says, to beauty and increase.

Now my father is gone and so are the green
         and glorious pleasures of his garden. But
in the summers of my memory, where at
         the side of the fading house the garden lies,
the sunflower rises, watches, follows the light
         that wakes the garden in the boy from sleep
and still like love supplants the darkness.

Where I Left My Childhood

         Study and in general the pursuit of truth
         and beauty is a sphere of activity in which
         we are permitted to remain children all out lives.
                                    —Albert Einstein

The house where I left my childhood,
and to which I now return, wasn’t grand,
two bedrooms before my father made
it three, one for the two of them, one
for my brother, one for me. Middle class,
I’d say, perhaps upper lower middle class.

Yet outside my father planted a willow,
and after several years, on sunny days
when in the hot summer winds the tree
would throw wild shadows against
the side of the house, I would lie
on the cooling grass in the side yard

and watch, fascinated, mesmerized,
as the shadows waved and caressed
the siding, deepening the bright light
by contrast, until I saw in shadow
and by the intermittent flash a kind
of life I had not known there before,

a world I had not seen before, a place
without a name, all beyond our home
as I had known it, where my parents
were rarely seen to kiss, where brothers
competed for hierarchy and attention.
Lying there, the shadows waving

across my house, I came at last to see
what was far away and near, weeping
like the willow, in a wind that never
ceased to blow, rising from the root
and through the feather-veined leaves
of imagination’s wind-tossed tree.

So this is where I left my childhood,
and the place to which I now return,
like Odysseus in pursuit of Ithaca,
tossed, and sometimes lost at sea,
remembering and now discovering
that my childhood has never left me.

Tercets

Every year, once each year,
we would wake before dawn,
pile into the car, the four of us,

and begin our long-awaited
vacation to the South, from
which we had migrated when

I was still a whining infant.
And on those early mornings
we would pause for breakfast

some three hours after our
departure, always at the same
diner where we were served,

year after unfolding year, by
the same person, a young
woman, early twenties perhaps,

who has been buried in the vault
of my memory. Her hair,
cropped just beneath her chin,

glistened like a blackbird’s
feathers in the sunshine. Her
waist was cinched with an apron,

a white and angelic piece
of cloth, a billowing cloud
about her body. Her eyes,

like my mother’s eyes, shone
as black as the night sky. And my
parents knew that I, even at

that young age, was stricken
by this goddess, this fairy from
a land away, this princess I

could never know. Yet, I know
her now as one who knows a page
he has been reading again and again,

like the poem whose mysteries
have held my mind’s attention
for as long as I can remember.

Because you have passed me
on the street, your hair’s luster,
albeit from a distance, shining

in this morning sunlight, waking
me once again, unlocking the vault
of memory where I have stored

her away. Dante could not,
in tercet after galloping tercet,
have loved his Beatrice more

than I have loved this nameless
presence that lives inside me still.
And I see nothing now but stars.

California

              omnia mutantur, nihil interit
                                          —Ovid

Once when my mother said to get a stick
off the willow and whip that boy, meaning
me, my father took me to the yard, broke
the stick away from the tree, handed it
to me and said, Don’t tell your mother,

just say you won’t do it again. Now as
I sit in the hospital room’s uneasy chair
my father turns his gray face toward me asking,
It gets in the blood, I guess? And I must affirm
that yes, it does, though I sense the affirmation

isn’t exactly what he wants to hear. It becomes
a shadow hovering in the corner opposite his bed.
And I can’t tell him that I imagine it’s morphed
into a bear breathing in a dark cave, an eel lurking
beneath a sunken rock, a fish piercing the surface

of a black pond feeding on innocent flies. When
he says the word blood, I feel the dusty breath
of the bear, hear the sudden splash of the fish,
I sense the slippery surface of the hidden eel.
Just figure I’ve gone to California, he says,

his eyes lifting to the corner of the room.
And I remember he never wanted to turn
the stem of the willow into an instrument
to teach the unruly boy a lesson. After all,
he adds, sparing me again, it’s just a change.

Kite

            Stand here in front of me
            and take the strain.
                                 —Seamus Heaney

One Sunday morning he cut
two hollow sticks and set them
crosswise, wrapped and tied
some string to hold their shape,

stirred a dram of water in a bowl
of flour till it alchemized into
an ashen-gray paste. He folded
the funnies round the cruciform,

and with his fingers spread
the sticky mess on paper hems
until the cross transformed into
a diamond. After fixing a tail

of bowties to the lower point,
he cinched a ball of string
to the heart of the cross, walked
me to the open yard where

he helped me catch the wind.
The kite ascended into the sky
and hung before the piercing sun
still lancing my eyes to tears and joy.

On the River

As I sit here this dawning
on the bank of the river,
an osprey soaring above,
its pinching cries piercing
the air, I think of my father,
his eyes failing with age,
his round cheeks sagging,
who said he always wanted
to live on the river, which
in time he accomplished.

Mornings he would cast
his line into the water
as if unraveling a mystery
and wait for the bobber
to dip then rise, then dip
and rise again before
pulling up to set the hook
and reeling in the catch
like a sacred answer to
a prayer. Today the water

stands in place, no current
to move it long, no wind
to disturb this holy stillness.
But as a fish breaks the surface
with a flopping splash of surprise,
I wish my father could be here
watching with his failing sight
as the osprey suddenly dives
to seize what rises from below,
to hold what remains alive.

© V. P. Loggins, all rights reserved.