Monday, January 13, 2025

I rearranged objects and piles of papers and things in my closet, not for any special reason but because I found myself doing it and didn’t stop. There was an old notebook of my dad’s. I leafed through a couple pages to find a poem, dated 1991. No one likes to read a poem. But I knew I had to read this one. I followed down his low, stretchy cursive, so familiar and distinctly his. It was about the view from his window at night. He was living in Paris by then. It’s a scene I’ve seen a hundred times. Yellow glowy headlights like eyes, shadowy figures dart across the street. Suggestive of a river, of life, of something sinister too. He ends by asking, who down there sees me?

The rest of the notebook was blank.