songlines of a life

Day 4 of my Poetry Week; wherein I'm highlighting an assortment of 'poetry purchases' that I've recently made ...

... and today, it's Eamonn Wall's 2004 collection, as pictured above:


HERITAGE

By then ninety he reversed hands
so I might read a fable inscribed
on his soft washed palms. Self-
evident, he said, no bother please
with why, what, or how. He let
me run my fingers along his lines.
Closing his eyes, my father breathed
with an even calm. I smelled
onion on his breath, chapstick
richly coated to his lips. Light
of winter weak, defined, found
the curtain’s slit, crossed his
crown as it wound across the room.
The lines I followed backward,
every strand ended neatly
tied with bows: green, red, white,
pink like roses and greens that grew
once in his garden by the sea:
songlines of a father’s life yielded
up to me, two bodies joined together
winter’s afternoon, light and water
flowed. Traffic along a moving street:
he sought to pass his life along to me.

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Eamonn Wall (1955 - )

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