How Could It Be?

 

I see you now and again across a restaurant

the red of your jumper catching my eye,

the blue and white check shirt pulling at the sleeve of my attention.

When I look up, of course, it’s not you

How could it be?

 

I see you in the hospital waiting room hunched

in an uncomfortable plastic chair.

I see the top of your head through thinning hair

still carefully combed

when he looks up, of course, it isn’t you

How could it be?

 

I imagine I hear you nod your approval

over my shoulder as I read a well-constructed poem

or exceptional piece of literature.

I hear your slow and deliberate consideration;

“Hmmmmm, yeeeeessss” but it isn’t you

How could it be?

 

Six years have passed.

Your presence hasn’t waned as one would expect it to

like a receding shadow or fading bloom.

You are as real to me now as you were in life

though I cannot choose to visit you,

only treasure the glimpses I am gifted;

at the concert hall, the bookshop,

in the armchair.

 

Day 18 of Napowrimo and the challenge was to write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail.

This poem is about my Father-In-Law who never seems too far away, even now.