for Sam Steiber
I can't get at the truth of you
Between us twenty-five years
In which you are here with me
And no longer here
You left us memories . . . .
The sight of you
Getting off the bus each evening
Striding toward the house
Your arms open wide
To the three girl children racing down the sidewalk
The sound of your voice
singing, "You are my sunshine . . ."
Loud and joyous and gloriously off key
The scent of Old Spice
That we gave you every Father's Day
Until the medicine cabinet was lined with bottles
Each bearing a delicate blue clipper ship
Late-August days in the Adirondack Mountains
Rowing along the shoreline to the rocks where the fish fed
Your daughters, instant disaster
Our lines snared on the rocks, tangled in the lily pads
Your efforts to be patient as you freed us again and again
(You'd wanted sons all along)
And your true patience
When you caught the biggest bass of the summer
And I, feeling sorry for it, threw it back
Autumn campfires on the beach at Coney Island
All of us windswept and shivering
Noses running, hands sticky with sand and melted marshmallows
And laughing — I remember my hair blowing into my teeth as we laughed
Because we were together with our cousins
And for you nothing could be better
The silver and turquoise bracelets you brought me
I wear them still
And that night
That last walk you took across an unlit highway
We waited on the shoulder of the road
And when a kind man stopped, asked, "Is everything okay?"
I answered, "Fine. Some luggage blew off the roof and my father went to get it."
"Oh," he said, "because I thought someone got hit."
And I, night-blind even then, couldn't see it
"Everything's fine," I told him
These memories, they don't touch the half of it
Not your pain
For the father you never knew
The mother you lost
The friends you couldn't save
Not your terror at your own waning strength
Nor the bone-deep surety we all shared
That yours would be the first death
All I know is that
Since that night
When you walked across the highway
I cannot touch you
You have left me glimpses of a place I can no longer enter
And even those glimpses are wrong
Death has sewn your image to grief
And I must loosen those stitches
I have spent a lifetime feeling I could not find my true home
Now I see that all these years
I have been homesick for you
I was your sunshine
But you were my sun
I live now in the Sonora
A place so alien to the world you gave us
I wake to winter skies flooded with light
To blazing summer days when the earth thirsts for rain
Like all desert dwellers I mold my life to the course of the sun
All that is woven
Fades and loosens beneath it, nothing holds
Not even the stitches of grief
I am fully in the sun's land
What other place for one who has
So longed for your warmth?
About the Author: Ellen Steiber is the author of one mythic novel, A Rumor of Gems, plus numerous books for young readers, and folklore–inspired short stories published in the Snow White, Blood Red series, and elsewhere.
Cpoyright © 1997 by Ellen Steiber. The poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author’s express written permission.