Reading: A Triptych

I.

I have many of my father’s books:
engineering manuals, college annuals,
Reader’s Digest & Harvard Classics,
& some from my old man’s old man:
including the Poems of Rupert Brooke.
I’ve stacked them & shelved them &
run my eyes & fingers over them
searching for notes in & between lines
that might let resurface some ancestral
remembrance that might finally reconnect
the living & the dead & the still to come.
Nothing comes but sacred memories,
being read to: Tom Saywer, Kidnapped,
Treasure Island…what were those lines
he memorized? It wasn’t often,
but deeply instilling: the imparting
of a need, to read, to write, to pass along.
It took years to take root, but by the time
he passed my mind was made strong:
there is something he left for me to complete.

II.

Reading my father’s miniscule Aquinas,
(he must have carried it in his pocket—
in his coat in South Bend, or a bookbag
in Lawrence with his brother on Missouri Street.
I can see him now stealing five, ten minutes
near the Campanile, beside a tree reading:

The Clue to this mystery lies in the nature of
man’s true happiness.

Was it with him when he wrecked the Plymouth?
Did it save his life?) I am struck with the thought
that this moment found its being somewhere
between happenstance & power of will.

When I went to the basement book room, un-
finished, (he would understand) it was not what
I was looking for, but I was a pilgrim looking
for Annie Dillard & a note from long ago,
but I stumbled on this little black book in
the God section—next to Dante, Kierkegaard,
& Sir Thomas More—& the leather felt
smooth in my hand, like the notebook I carry
every day, like some piece of a future or a past
I cannot be without. I gave up on Annie &
brought it up. I read, skipping whole sections
until I fell asleep, hoping for a dream glimpse
of some version of the man he was, I need.

III.

As I sit here writing this, my son sleeps
in the room next door; I listen to his
easy breathing through a monitor that
sits next to me. He is old enough we
need not worry about him in the night,
but I keep his breathing as close as I can.
I admit to the middle of the night creep
to peer in at his still small body in some
position only the very young would choose
for resting. We all have our favorites. Except
for the occasional night terror he sleeps
soundly—calling every now & then
for one of us to come & get him: “out, out.”

I wonder if he sees him in his dreams
as I occasionally do. It comes & goes—
it has been a while now. Sometimes,
I believe that if there is a God that intervenes
He would let him come to him in his sleep
as he does to me. Let him show up as
storyteller, as playmate, as quiet reader:

I remember him as if it were yesterday,
as he came plodding to the inn door,
his sea-chest following behind him…

Sometimes I am convinced that he knows
the secret need to read & be read to:
father to son.

I never knew my father’s father except through
the portrait that hung in upstairs hall opposite
the image of Jesus as teacher, with the children.
As I said, I have his books too. I never knew him,
but I can almost hear him reading to my father:

Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.

tired eyes in need of sleep, & a tired mind
in need of restoration, I feel the fated glimpse of
a future that may or may not include me: I see,
or, rather, I hear the voice of my own son, reading
from one of my books:

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait,

at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.