Nothing Is Diminished by Distance

                                                                    Ronn Morris

The decades stack like folding chairs,
and you’re in this room of steel and linen
Here are the monitors that sound the heart’s depth.
Here are the machines that censure the future.

And suddenly it becomes forever and forever
and forever. And you return to the
tip-toe, hush-now Sundays when your
father’s clogged valves give air
the weight and shimmer of mercury.

If you could pare back the seasons
to that lost bountiful summer, you would
live in the long white house on the cold-water coast.
You would sit outside on the roofed veranda.
You would sup at the pine-wood table among
terracotta pots of lavender and lemon verbena.

This is your childhood. Let the air be balmy.
Let the sky be a remarkable shade of blue.
Let him, that sparkling man, your papa, clasp your arm
and rasp of things that do not matter
Like the move from the Winter Palace,
like the annexation of the hinterland,
like the necessary tyranny of your poor mama.

In the room of steel and linen the clock keeps on sticking
Here hope is concertinaed into seconds.
Your father’s fingers, in yours, clutch like birds’ feet.
Let go of his hand. Step around and past the monitors
and out of the ward. Walk away from the building.
Remember that nothing is diminished by distance,
neither prayer, nor the memory of great pain.