It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
in history, the one that counts
the progress of time as seismic
shifts, as the partitioning of before
and after, as if history unfurls
a taut chain that surveys the distance
from one point on the landscape
to the boundary of another
while everything else falls to the side
like small pebbles along a rock-face
bound to nothing but the abyss
of unrecorded intimacies, dark and spacious
as those tunnels the imagination builds
from pools of ink. My father leans
over a page, his brown hand
bound to the binding of a book
and the book a white fog from which
steps forth a man wandering alone
along a country path and walking, walking
all day long the endless length of a field
in search of what the resistance of a wind alone
could teach him—the type of man who,
possessed by vagrant passions, becomes the man
he reads about in a book, and so is also
my father standing up from a twin cot
in a small room with an even smaller suitcase
and wandering into a field he walks all day long
against a wind that smells of the Welsh sea
until weak-kneed and parched with thirst
he stops for water in a churchyard.
This is before I am a point of view
in history, before he becomes a household
bound, like any man, to that war between
self-clouding sorrow and vague ambition.
It is the month of Chaitra. The beginning
of a new year. Everywhere in the field
fluttering around him, nameless as the impulse
that first led him here, the bright and strange
crowd of yellow flowers called daffodils.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Supritha Rajan‘s “My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,