My Image

The child narcissism in my father’s eyes,

the voice listened to by Jesuit priests,

his infant body swaddled in a terry cloth robe,

cradled lovingly in the arms of an ageless nurse,

the spectacle of my father’s overcoat,

his enthusiastic pose (the pose I am holding now),

the heart that is everywhere, before I arrive and

after I depart. Through the world I wear his five-petalled suit,

integrity, self-love, dignity, resolve, courage,

our Ideas share the same source of divinity as

great men. But something lacking in us both,

we each have lost our mothers, and having lost them,

we walk through the city on wintry nights, blissfully cold

we walk through the surface of the snow

in glittering darkness, in absences—

among centipedes of people carrying shopping bags

for relatives;

we walk under canopies of Christmas lights.

CRA 11/26/2005