Poem

David Trame

PRINTS

Old father, oxygen pipe in his nose,
now you know, he can't do without it
and it's clear, so clear, what we feel
impending about him.
The walls, the hospital room, are his frame now,
this squared, encasing closeness.
We talk, from time to time,
he fidgets with the newspaper,
watches absentmindedly his swollen feet.
Silence, swollen too, takes you by the throat
at the end of each sentence;
his face that could be your face-
time can be faster than you wish-
is what you can't leave,
jaw drooping with that sort
of bewilderment, that stare
into the estranging rhythm of the air.
We know the fear of sensing
the constant ebbing creeping in,
like whole stretches of sea slipping away,
furiously first, then resignedly,
wave after wave.
And we know memory with its prints,
that nevertheless doesn't give in,
letting the same beam shine in the eye,
the same finger linger on the corner of the mouth,
telling us that this at least won't go.

While we all go. On the train to the hospital
you have seen the waves of the vineyards stream,
pregnant with the early autumn leaves, arms
of dense green, widespread, tense in their skies
of grapes budding underneath.
The pressing print of the land.
What stays.

David Trame

David Trame is an Italian teacher of English. Born and living in Venice, he's been writing poems exclusively in English since 1993. Since 1999 his poems have been published in about 200 literary magazines in the U.K, U.S. and elsewhere. Trame's poetry collection, Re-Emerging, was published as an online book by www.gattopublishing.com in 2006.

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