Cento: Poem about My Father

The trees rise from the darkness of the world
in this, my last poem about my father.
To hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him.
He told where all the running water goes,
and now he’s dead.
Everything’s mine but just on loan,
time and the bell have buried the day,
the round sky goes on minding its business.
I turned and looked the other way:
sorrow’s springs are the same.
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful,
no one arrives without leaving soon.
There was nowhere at all to go.


Sources:
Randall Jarrell, “In the Ward: The Sacred Wood”
Paul Muldoon, “Cherish the Ladies”
e. e. cummings, “no man,if men are gods;but if gods must”
Wendell Berry, “The Current”
Robert Pack, “The Boat”
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving But Drowning”
Wyslawa Szymborska, “Travel Elegy”
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
Sylvia Plath, “Parliament Hill Fields”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: to a Young Child”
Howard Nemerov, “The View from an Attic Window”
Charles Wright, “This World Is Not My Home, I’m Only Passing Through”
Robert Graves, “The Suicide in the Copse”