Fathers
Rent from DeepDyve- Fathers
(for Yehuda Amichai, Sept. 22, 2000)
My father also moves in light now, outwardBound in fading shadow. On extreme horizons—Waking windows, phantasms of twisting shards—So many final things circle in the son,Myself on the way to the airport, I readBlack-on-white, he was gone up from the city of gold.Those streets glow now with words set burnishedIn the solid walls of his still verse—b'zal el.We met once, word-father, in the city of angels.I pressed your flesh among the celebrities.Behind you, sunset streaked across this plastic pale,As your quick eye sketched desert wind in moonlit trees.The soldier has gone, his midnight arms unwind;The poet sings eternal in fields of the mind.
William (Zev) Wallis's Selected Poems 1969–99 was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and his novel Hawk was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Popular Fiction in 2006. His ode entitled "Writing" appears in Maven in Blue Jeans, a Festschrift in Honor of Zev Garber (Purdue University Press, January 2009). He is professor and Vice-chair of English at Los Angeles Valley College, where he also taught Yiddish Literature in Translation in the Jewish Studies Department.
