Azure gate. Requiem for my dad
dear dad:
The day you closed your eyes
a number of emotions took the better of me
but one in particular turned out to be of some consequence
A person who had entered my life during the twilight of yours
and spent much of her time advertising primordial kinds of sentiments
turned out to be ripe with malicious poison with no apparent reason
I felt ashamed, because I should have known better
because I felt I’d somehow failed your teaching
and the importance of keeping our lives free of the ill-intentioned
The embarrassment turned relief back into new pain for me
as the end of the inhuman sufferance bestowed upon you
was not to know an end
I found unexpected help in a few words
that a different version of the same person had reminded me:
pain should be mustered and channeled into positive output.
The day you closed your eyes was a Sunday
and the following Sunday I found the newspaper I bought
just before I got the hospital’s (last) call.
I have spent the Sundays that have gone by since then
performing a lonely but fulfilling (for me) ritual:
fleshing out a mémoire involontaire on the newspaper pages
as if to cover with other words and other lines
the words of some papers I will never bring myself to read,
much less comprehend.
This is a mémoire volontaire of work you had not seen
I would have liked to share with you:
an intimate trope of a personal memory.
May those memories be the gate that still link us:
an azure gate to the azure town you now inhabit.