Ond’ella: ‘Io dicerò come procede
per sua cagion ciò ch’ammirar ti face,
e purgherò la nebbia che ti fiede…’
—Canto 28, lines 88–90
Addressing temporary loss, a flare of imagination
in fog so thick the mountain is not even gesture,
and Katherine peers down the asphalt
searching for the school bus. I am driving
Tim home and he says Mum will be back from the East
in four sleeps, and you, Dad, can talk to me
like Mum talks to me when you’re gone.
My sense of balance has skewed. This terrace,
so hidden, is one we forget we cross
so frequently, but stay fixed to the spot. It’s
the divider puncturing the map, years of calibrating
and thinking we’ve got its measure,
when a notch in the amorphous, smothered vista,
shows something’s missing and you’re not sure
what it is, or was; the weather, so localised,
does sweep in from all points, against the wind,
or like now, when the blank stillness is deficit,
a nightbird pushing it out like darkness distended.