When Dad’s gait became too unsteady even for a walking-stick

the world itself stepped forwards to meet him.  In the grounds

of the village where we’d go for a walk

he’d stop, fascinated by the gardeners hauling at ivy,

tugging at its hawsers, lifting the little green flags

that announce its colonies beyond the shade. 

A family joke:

he stopped because he never figured out

how to walk and talk at the same time.  Either action —

performed properly, paying sufficient attention to its purpose —

left no capacity to carry out the other.

Bookends for a life: in the ghetto’s chilly one-room library

he found a volume of Jules Verne’s stories that he read to his friends,

chiding them that they could hardly complain

when comparing their lot with that of Captain Grant’s children.

And in the last photo we have of him he sits hunched over

a book I’ve found for him, too heavy to read in bed

so he’s placed it on the coffee-table, his by-now bony shoulders

perched in anticipation over the next page:

Russian sagas vast as the steppes, Wall Street shenanigans,

carnivals and cavalries of the great and forgotten.

Years afterward he could remember a well-told anecdote

or insightful phrase that captured an epoch or the arc of conflict

which he would recount to a nurse held back from her hurried rounds,

a delivery boy bewildered by an impromptu history lesson at the door,

with indefatigable faith that, regardless of education, homeland or age,

the lapels of anyone’s intuition should be grasped with the same intensity.

Because every day —

even the hard-slog days, the bogged-down, ragged days,

days when the best you hope for is to put one foot in front of the other —

it’s still within the gift of our attention

to haul at facts,

tug at the stubborn roots of our certainty,

to give form and life to something greening with discovery,

something that might even turn out to be dazzling

but in any case is something

that wouldn’t otherwise have been there.

​

Last Stanza Poetry Journal Issue 21: Conversation, July