Wissahickon Creek

First the fear of falling. Then the names forgotten.

Near the end

My father’s mind like a shorting motor

arcing and sparking.

When once an ancient blunder suddenly recalled

could make him snap

His fingers in anguish, now, for a term, he lives a life

which endlessly reinvents itself,

Nothing remembered, every second new,

alien, unrecognizable.

He battles it awhile with baffled grace,

greets as best he can

The unknown interns, the offspring,

the woman who is his wife.

In the end he tires. Then it was the anger came,

the shouting down blind hospital halls,

the final sullen silence.

The pathologist’s report, black ink on white paper:

too dense to count

The tangled plaques in the sliver of brain

fixed and stained upon the slide.

I wept — the only time —

thinking of the thickening underbrush

Through which my father fought,

the string of beads unstrung,

The sea-cliff shelving, the solid universe itself

become what Coleridge called

“An immense heap of little things.”

Nothing new in that.

Our own universe, they tell us,

Endlessly ramifies, at every quantum instant

bifurcates, each outcome

A new branch along some space-time line,

the world a serpent

Shedding options like old skins.

Everything that ever was,

Everything that might have been,

is here somewhere,

Down some diverging path

in this enchanted wood

The hue for every changing leaf, the shape

of every shifting cloud, even, perhaps,

At the end of some quiet corridor,

my father in sunlight, seated,

his troubled hands at peace.

But of so many paths we travel one.

A tree’s way is to branch

And branch again. Borne skyward

by a rising tide of sap,

No twig rejoins the twig it left,

no leaf re-fuses

With the leaf it grew beside,

Always the aiming upward

Away from earth, always the leaving

of what has been behind.

Yet here we are.

To a silver creek in a favored wood we’ve come.

It’s early Spring.

My father’s wife of fifty years,

his sons and daughter,

The ones they love, their children, all are here.

I, who also snap

My fingers at recollected anguish,

I too am here.

On a boulder in the stream we stand.

We bow our heads

Beneath a canopy of newborn leaf.

My father’s flesh and bones,

Now fire-refined, are greyish powder.

We strew his ashes in the stream,

His dust between our fingers.

Around how many boulders

Will this water flow,

divide, rejoin, divide, rejoin,

Before it undivided bears

my father’s body

to the sea?

Michael Sanders received advanced degrees in music and mathematics. He has played as a piano soloist and accompanist in America and Japan. He also taught in the music departments of USC, UC Irvine, and Chapman University and received recognition from violinist Isaac Stern and from music critic Martin Bernheimer. Beyond his performance career, he divided his time between leading church music programs and teaching college mathematics, while writing the occasional poem. He is now retired with his wife to Monterey County where he lives among deer browsing the lawn, seagulls crowding the skies, and morning fogs..