My Father’s City
Reminiscing about growing up
in the west end of the city,
he never took me there. Cables
of streetcar avenues sparked
as whales on tracks passed by
and made each building shudder,
There on a rainy night, lights
reflecting on the sidewalks,
and the stores that once led
different lives, a theatre
where he spent afternoons
rooting for cowboy heroes
as he stared at a flickering
in the dark like dying star –
no one foretold the changes,
the reel ending, the aging
out of players, their parts
scripted out until they served
their purpose and vanished –
no one from his era lives now.
No one can tell me the truth
of boulevards where well-to-do
houses broke down in pain
as life reached for its height
merely by being lived.
My steps retrace nothing
but the paths of glories
that pass from the world
where every glance over
my shoulder reminds me
how unwilling Time can be
to loosen its grip on secrets,
the minutiae of day to day
that always gets left behind
the way I left him the night
before he died, too weak
to walk me to the elevator,
to despairing to carry
the past another step ahead.
I waited for the lift to arrive
but it took years to come
and even then only headed
down where it began again
the slow ascent to its end.