Always Present

---

In response to my Papa Larry’s poem: “Just One More Time”

---

Remember what Eliot wrote, that

“What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present”

And so your “have-beens” of driftwood fires near the sea

Are, dear Papa, my present.

---

---

Might I remind you–

Time is like the Atlantic rolling into Cape Cod Bay:

There is never really one last wave, one last sigh,

Never really one last time.

---

---

I might start with the shutters.

I may not know how to carve a maple leaf or sailboat,

But dear heaven, I pray there are shutters on my front windows

And plants on the porch, and wicker chairs, and a red wagon full of mums,

Like your stoop on Highway 50 in the fall.

---

---

Do you have any old friends still living on the Cape?

I could visit them; in fact, I’ve already met a few:

Little Ridgevale Cottage, and Nauset Light, and the lupines on Fort Hill,

Which you’d introduced me to before I met them

So your friends, Papa, are now mine.

---

---

The fireplace was cold when I sat by it

In the Stockbridge inn one summer afternoon,

But I could imagine it was Christmas, and the hearth kettle was hot with tea

And you and Nanny were swapping stories with the locals

Your voices in the parlor, Trent’s piano on the stairs.

---

---

You once asked me to take a trip for you, to Authors’ Ridge

To Orchard House and Walden, to where Hawthorne wrote

(And hid when he saw Bronson Alcott coming through the gate),

Where the Concord forests hush quiet as gravestones in fall

And I haven’t forgotten it.

---

---

Sedalia might be the “still point where the dance is”,

Since both you and I were present there in June,

Where ragtime bounded like a train from the depot down Fifth Street

And where we stood on the banks at Liberty Park with Dad,

Where Dad had stood with Nanny.

---

---

There’s a picture of me in a quilt on the seashore

Where I’d walk barefoot at sundown and read the Quartets,

And it’s the first place my mind goes when I think about Jared and I

Walking hand-in-hand somewhere in the future

Like you and Nanny in the sunlit past—

Which (and there’s Eliot again), is always present.

---

---

Might I remind you–

Time is like the Atlantic rolling into Cape Cod Bay:

There is never really one last wave, one last sigh,

Never really one last time.

---