Working Late

A light is on in my father’s study.

“Still up?” he says, and we are silent,

looking at the harbor lights,

listening to the surf

and the creak of coconut boughs.

 

He is working late on cases.

No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,

actually pacing out and measuring,

while the fans revolving on the ceiling

winnow the true from the false.

 

Once he passed a brass curtain rod

through a head made out of plaster

and showed the jury the angle of fire—

where the murderer must have stood.

For years, all through my childhood,

if I opened a closet . . . bang!

There would be the dead man’s head

with a black hole in the forehead.

 

All the arguing in the world

will not stay the moon.

She has come all the way from Russia

to gaze for a while in a mango tree

and light the wall of a veranda,

before resuming her interrupted journey

beyond the harbor and the lighthouse

at Port Royal, turning away

from land to the open sea.

 

Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,

she is still the mother of us all.

I can see the drifting offshore lights,

black posts where the pelicans brood.

 

And the light that used to shine

at night in my father’s study

now shines as late in mine.