Elegy Ending with a Line from Thomas Hardy

POETRY

by Lynne Knight

I give my father a desk in a quiet room.
          There’s a standing lamp behind him,
to the left, with a marble base to keep it
          from tipping over. He’s facing the wall
not the window. He’s going to tell
          his story, the long story of his life.
He sits a long while deciding what
          to say first. He tries to remember

his mother’s face when she was young,
         his father’s. He has photos, but nothing
from his earliest years. He knows
          his father used to take long walks
through the park & pick hawthorn
          to bring back to the house, a vase
of branches he later learned brought
          bad luck. Was his father unhappy?

Is that where his unrest began, watching
          his father go off into the park while
his mother sat sewing or reading,
          or stood muttering over the next
meal in the kitchen? Overwhelming,
          a life, even the little you remember
of all the years, so much time a blur:
          Boyhood, marriage, the stillborn son.

The war, the discharge: a heart
          murmur, one that said all along,
not enough, not enough, not enough.
          Even the good wife, not enough.
Even the daughters, the two who lived.
          (Two others stillborn, one aborted
to save his wife’s life.) Then drink.
          Poisoning drink. The years blur.

The years blur. The dreams. The dreams.
          Letters to politicians, letters to authors.
Applications for patents. The dreams.
          Then the cancer, stage 4, too late.
What does one life amount to? What
          does it mean? He fiddles with his pen,
sets it down, lights a cigarette. Smoke
          rises, disappears. Ah, no; the years, the years—