WHAT LOOKS LIKE A MAN.
A bar somewhere.
Crowds of cigarettes shouting and laughing,
and booze burning brdges, building some others
or just licking the lips of an empty shoreline.
He, an uncanny Messiah, solitary,
sits in a glass on the edge of life;
listening to the sweet stench of voices
and the record that slips on the turntable
and the loud money waving goodbye
and the world playing for time
and the silence of his mind,
and the silence, where it crawls, in between the noise.
So he relaxes, deeper, protected
by the glass walls in his hand,
watching the sound of the evening
in its delirium pass by.
Through the glass, through the smoke,
through the talking air on its nightly rounds,
there, close to the fire, stands a man
smiling: The father, dead from yesterday,
grey teeth reflecting the flames' murmurs, appearing to speak.
The son hears nothing from behind his walls,
only sees the smiling man walk away
in the passage of flames - the moment fades.
A river takes to the roads where an age of ice
marked out the channels he knows too well:
at other times they are dry reaches
that his face calls maturity, creating
what looks like a man.
written by my late husband Alex circa 1978
