Neil Aitken
My Father as
Landscape
My father is a forest in winter where death
has cast her grey nets wide over the outstretched
limbs.
He is not the pale skin of snow, nor what lies
beneath:
last year’s leaves pooling in remembered red, the
tumbled nests
of wrens, the bones of sparrows lightened by sorrow,
whatever
the winds have laid down in their paths. He is the
bear who
lingers
at the edge of the frozen creek though the
blackberries are gone.
He is the tree split by a summer storm, the last of
the pollen
caught in an awkward breeze. The deer stepping back
out of the
light.
But I am not a forest. I am a road cutting through the
forest’s
midst.
I am what the mountain yields, the path through the
tall
shadows
of pines and maples. I am the line that stitches the
earth, my
body
an unending arc of stone and gravel. I am the eye, the
sight, the
sign
at the edge of the ravine before the drop to nothing.
I am the
steel rail
on which you lean, the cross and the wild flower
burning against
the dark.
Copyright
© by Neil Aitken 2007. All rights reserved.
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