I PUT THE LETTERS AWAY AND WENT TO BED. OLD WATER in the water glass on the bedside table. I could taste time in the water when I drank it, stale metal in my mouth. I left the window open even though the spring night was cold. The house empty save for me, would the night breeze increase its absence? Lydia was a name I said to myself in the silence of my head. Stale metal in the head.
father sits in my bed reading
the book I am reading
is the book I am writing mysteriously bound
it’s about me he says
his eyes are pale he says come with me
father walks outside the house and out
across the lawn he peers in at the window
the study has a lamp lit on the desk
he says the study is mine it’s about me
he says follow me his feet remove the dew
from the grass from every blade of grass
the dew wets the cement under his feet as he walks
I walk behind him
he isn’t singing but there is a song
in the apple tree in blossom on the rise
my father points at himself he is sitting
in the midst of the blossoms singing all alone
and when he sees me my father
stops his song and says
both of them say my fathers both say
I looked back and I failed
I woke before the alarm and heard the alarm click before the radio’s voice began speaking. Investigators believe the poet fell off a cliff on the backside of the volcano. They cannot find his body. Investigators report they found the poet’s footprints near the crater of the volcano. They think he had injured his leg; that he had weakened. At the cliff’s edge the footprints disappear. No one could survive the fall. Further search has been canceled. I clicked the radio off and in the half darkness went to the study. I pulled out the novel and put it on the desk. I picked it up again. Its heft is some form of life that is also my own. The night’s dream indelible in my mind.
I looked back and I failed.
Page’s poor memory whose poverty is its perfection.
I stood up, novel in hand, and dropped it in the trash bin. It landed with a metallic thud, a single drumbeat, and then all was silent.
I walked out of the office. I walked out of the house. I walked through the dew-wet grass to the window. I stared in at the study, at the desk, where every morning for many years I sat and wrote. I stared into the room at my absence. I was the one who was missing.