‘It’s his lung,
You see?’
–
He wastes air; old
willow, casts out over
auburn lakes;
invisible shades wake
in
the depthless breadth;
the overture left
to cleft in breath
–
that he struggles to still
as if he were
weighted
on his child’s
tiny traced
tip
toes, in an empty corridor
walked passed every night,
too afraid
of the rasping gyres
behind the door
way to father’s breath
–
‘Yes, it’s his lung’
hiding the cancer
of being told
‘It’s his lung’
–
and when they say it
he feels it
and when he stops listening
and lays under his parasol
of the willow fall,
in the heat of a hazy sun’s
adumbral afternoon,
he billows over the lakes;
a swallow in his soul.
