BY Carolyn Forché
Appears
We weren’t told as children there is no going back.
But we are allowed to keep with us a few times and places
thin as tissue paper in the mind.
Finding these in the mind is like moving through a forest at night.
We do this alone in our rooms in the dark by light of an open door.
Then a thought comes like a bird landing on a blanket.
Someone else’s papa coming toward us with his belt off.
“Ever since he came home from the war,” we would say of him.
While we children hid in the holes we had dug in the fields,
in the houses we built in the trees.
This is a house of spider-lace and blankets filled with down
from geese that once flew in the clouds.
In the carpenter’s atelier, there is the beginning of a boat that will
someday move along the river.
It will take on water in the rain but will never sink.
It will know what it is doing among the reeds.
It will sail even in a heavy dew. As light a river as that.
Wondrous to be floating in a boat we have made from oaks sealed with pitch.
Wondrous to think that we are all floating in a boat we ourselves have made.
Our river, glazed with light, moves more swiftly for some than others.
It is not bottomless. Not without a vast sea into which it will vanish at the end.
Strange, after so many centuries, to be alive at the end.
