September 2017
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
wexelblatt@verizon.net
I live near Boston and teach philosophy at Boston University. Besides academic pieces, I write fiction when I’m up to it and poems when I can’t help it. I use a fountain pen—my link to tradition—and write to music. I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals. My most recent book is Heiberg’s Twitch.
Father and Daughter
The dream’s a memory of what never happened
but should have, and so it’s precious and persists
as though it were true, the record of a
lifelong longing for an impossibility.
I’m washing the luncheon dishes then look
out the window above the sink into
the backyard. It’s the actual Newton
sink and kitchen window; but the yard is
broader, the apple tree taller, and under
it is a wrought-iron bench that looks French,
dazzlingly white in a summer afternoon
saturated with sun. It could be a scene
from a technicolor film of a
Henry James garden party. The emerald
grass is smooth as a new pool table, not
one bald spot or weed. Hosta and spirea
glisten behind buttery late daffodils.
On that bench, dressed in an outfit he might
have worn in his tennis youth, white shirt
and white trousers, my dead father sits with
my little blonde girl on his lap. She has on
a party dress, white as his shirt and the bench.
They are talking, laughing, eyes fastened on
each other’s as if there were nothing else
in the wide blue world worth a look.
They met only in this dream I hold fast.
This memory of what never transpired
is ineradicable. I’ve kept it
close for decades now and take it out on
need, like an old snapshot from the longest
and the sweetest of summer afternoons.
Note: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the
two most beautiful words in the English language.” -Henry James
Game of Chess
The detective runs against a granite
wall. A tomb. He’s cornered, escape
isn’t feasible—no possible escape.
The rancidly rational arch-villain
smiles at the cave’s mouth, backlit, a
heavy with a razor for a mouth.
Dispatching his armed minions into
the dark, he sighs then turns away.
Life will be safer now, but oh, so dull.
He forgets—this always happens—the
hero will, by some preposterous chance,
escape, spared for a sequel’s sake.
Fresh regiments of pawns and knights,
bishops and queens, shall battle on until,
at length, the king, author of all, is dead.
Father and Daughter
The dream’s a memory of what never happened
but should have, and so it’s precious and persists
as though it were true, the record of a
lifelong longing for an impossibility.
I’m washing the luncheon dishes then look
out the window above the sink into
the backyard. It’s the actual Newton
sink and kitchen window; but the yard is
broader, the apple tree taller, and under
it is a wrought-iron bench that looks French,
dazzlingly white in a summer afternoon
saturated with sun. It could be a scene
from a technicolor film of a
Henry James garden party. The emerald
grass is smooth as a new pool table, not
one bald spot or weed. Hosta and spirea
glisten behind buttery late daffodils.
On that bench, dressed in an outfit he might
have worn in his tennis youth, white shirt
and white trousers, my dead father sits with
my little blonde girl on his lap. She has on
a party dress, white as his shirt and the bench.
They are talking, laughing, eyes fastened on
each other’s as if there were nothing else
in the wide blue world worth a look.
They met only in this dream I hold fast.
This memory of what never transpired
is ineradicable. I’ve kept it
close for decades now and take it out on
need, like an old snapshot from the longest
and the sweetest of summer afternoons.
Note: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the
two most beautiful words in the English language.” -Henry James
Game of Chess
The detective runs against a granite
wall. A tomb. He’s cornered, escape
isn’t feasible—no possible escape.
The rancidly rational arch-villain
smiles at the cave’s mouth, backlit, a
heavy with a razor for a mouth.
Dispatching his armed minions into
the dark, he sighs then turns away.
Life will be safer now, but oh, so dull.
He forgets—this always happens—the
hero will, by some preposterous chance,
escape, spared for a sequel’s sake.
Fresh regiments of pawns and knights,
bishops and queens, shall battle on until,
at length, the king, author of all, is dead.
© 2017 Robert Wexelblatt
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